Over the last few days, a couple of local commentators (here and here) have been drawing parallels between Donald Trump and our own former Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon. I commented on one of those pieces, somewhat sceptically, and didn’t give it much more thought. But yesterday Tyler Cowen devoted his Bloomberg column to attempting to make exactly the same comparison, which prompted me to think about the case more carefully.
What would you think of a Western democratic leader who was populist, obsessed with the balance of trade, especially effective on television, feisty and combative with the press, and able to take over his country’s right-wing party and swing it in a more interventionist direction?
Meet Robert Muldoon, prime minister of New Zealand from 1975 to 1984. For all the comparisons of President Donald Trump to Mussolini or various unsavory Latin American leaders, Muldoon is a…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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