I made it to the theater Saturday night to see one of the summer Bollywood blockbusters I’d been waiting to see, Mangal Pandey – The Rising. The movie has gotten mixed reviews; this review lists all the clichés that weighed it down. Count me among the disappointed.

One minor annoyance in the film is a gratuitous slap at free-market economics that is so out of place it’s absurd. Mangal Pandey is a sepoy, an Indian soldier in the private army of the East India Company in the 1850s. An English officer explains to him how the East India Company works, then adds with a sneer: “And they call it the free market.” Excuse me? They – at least those in the know – called it mercantilism. The company operated under a legally rigged monopoly franchise, not in a free competitive market.

Adam Smith, the great 18th century champion of the free market, was a relentless critic of the company. He contrasted the bad deal the Company offered Indian workers with the beneficial results of the relatively free market that the British allowed in North America. Smith wrote (Wealth of Nations: B.I, Ch.8, Of the Wages of Labour, paragraph I.8.26):

The difference between the genius of the British constitution which protects and governs North America, and that of the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies, cannot perhaps be better illustrated than by the different state of those countries.

The film actually shows the soldiers enforcing at the point of a gun the company’s statutory monopoly on the growing of opium. Blocking competition with guns is the antithesis of the free market.