Posted on 03/03/2015 11:02:43 PM PST by grundle
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — The bulldozers, tractors and cranes are busy day and night, paving new roads, building tall glass buildings and constructing a new light rail system to stitch together the city’s ends.
In less than five years, the city’s skyline has changed drastically. Above the dust, in a seven-story building overlooking Meskel Square, sits Abiy Gebeyehu, a real estate development manager at the Sunshine Construction Company. He is going through files and figures, looking down at the spot where Ethiopia’s former communist dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, once smashed to the ground three bottles of what was supposedly blood as a warning to his opponents.
“The government changed its policy,” Mr. Gebeyehu said, explaining how his company became part of Ethiopia’s economic growth. “They are engaging private business.” Continue reading the main story Related Coverage
Once the epitome of poverty and hunger, Ethiopia is changing. Three decades after a famine that prompted America’s top singers to respond with “We Are the World,” Ethiopia has had an average economic growth rate of 10 percent for over a decade and has met or is coming close to meeting several important Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, according to the World Bank.
Some economists have called Ethiopia an “African lion,” mimicking the success stories of Asia’s economic tigers, and the government here has an ambitious plan to make Ethiopia a middle-income country by 2025.
It sometimes seems that everything here in the capital is under construction. Head out on one road in the morning and you might find it blocked off for a development project by evening. The thumping of jackhammers, the sight of men in orange vests, and the comments of Ethiopians who are at once infuriated by the inconvenience and impressed with their country’s transformation are constant.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The illegal Mexicans should move to Ethiopia for all those new jobs.
Communism=poverty. Get rid of the Communists and prosper. Why do so many people have trouble with that concept???
Because too many love the feel-good politics of Communism.
Robin hood was also very popular. Rob the rich and give money to the poor. Government guarantees you a job and food. Many people like guaranteed safety net. They do not care to work hard or feel they have no brains to learn a difficult skill. Communism is easy to sell to the masses.
The reason it always fails to create prosperity is it removes incentive to work hard and increase productivity. No use to innovate because there is no reward to reap.
“Get rid of the Communists and prosper. Why do so many people have trouble with that concept???”
From de Tocqueville...on equality.
“But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”
In other words, envy is the problem.
People decry human greed. But with just a bit of taming, greed can be corralled into “self-interest” resulting in capitalism. Envy on the other hand feeds on itself and inexorably leads to socialism and communism.
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” — Winston Churchill
The Robin Hood message is WRONG. He did take from the rich; but the nobles became rich by stealing from the common people. Robin Hood was returning what was rightfully theirs.
Again today, the rich (government) taxes to death the middle class and we need a Robin Hood more than ever.
Well I hope they can at least build some clinics for the disadvantaged.
Sounds like fascism since property rights are lacking.
Somehow, I have to come down to the basic belief that this economy boom is fueled by outside money (e.g., from places like the World Bank, the US and other countries). I’d also hazard a guess that the ROI has not started.
Ragnar Danneskjold: “But I’ve chosen a special mission of my own. I’m after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men’s minds, we will not have a decent world to live in.”
Hank Rearden: “What man?”
Ragnar: “Robin Hood.”
Ragnar: “. . . [Robin Hood] is not remembered as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became a symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, had demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors. It is this foulest of creatures – the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich – whom men have come to regard as the moral idea.” “. . . Do you wonder why the world is collapsing around us? That is what I am fighting, Mr. Rearden. Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive.”
The Pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld
From Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
So, there should be no Boko Haram terrorism because that’s really all about the economy, not Islam, right?
Get rid of the Communists and prosper
Don’t get too excited for Ethiopia. As soon as some muslim group gets wind of the progress they will come in a screw it up.
Yet even the so-called communist governments are doing free market economies. Got to have that money!
Ethiopia is Christian—they been fighting Islam since the start of that cult. Christian and capitalist are a great combination. See what happens when even a poor nation is unshakled? They may be the great power in Africa in the future!
Ethiopia should annex Djibouti and Eritrea. That would give them complete access to the sea. But if they did annex them they should also eradicate islam in both countries. And then possibly do the same to Somalia.
Maybe the pirates would get stomped on too!
Thanks, I was looking for that quote myself.
Because it's not gone, just renamed and given a new face. Trading one totalitarian regime for another is not necessarily an improvement. And Communism that embraces some capitalist traits doesn't magically cease to be Communist. Just look at China.
Yes, Ethiopia should expand to the sea and used forced conversion to make the people Christians—might not be as hard as it seems. Then, move on Somalia and southern (Christian) Sudan. The have the Ark of the Covenant after all and the full support of God (Israel may well help—Maybe Egypt too). Getting rid of Piracy is a real plan for the world and world peace. Maybe Russia and India would help here as well.
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