two decades makes…
At the Boathouse, we’ve been watching Michael Palin’s Around The World In 80 Days exploreumentary. Palin’s aim was to travel around the world in the footsteps of Verne’s Phileas Fogg, eschewing air travel in favor of boats, trains and various ungulate-powered conveyances, and film his experience. It’s very engaging to watch.
Palin made the series in 1988. On his journey, he stopped off in a backwater place called Dubai. The scenes from Dubai showed a place where poverty is the rule, not the exception, with a population subsisting through manual labor and primitive agriculture. Palin wasn’t impressed.
Twenty years later, poor Dubai has (unofficially, for now) built for themselves the tallest man-made structure on Earth, the stunningly beautiful Burj Dubai. The building isn’t finished, but the completion of the most recent portion of the construction has made the building the tallest man-made thing on the planet. Office space in the thing will cost something like $4,000.00 U.S.D. per square foot. The rest of the “Downtown Dubai” project surrounding the building is very very impressive in appearance as well.
Twenty years.
How they have accomplished all this is, apparently, not the obvious answer. Wikipedia says:
A majority of the emirate’s revenues are from trade, manufacturing and financial services. Revenues from petroleum and natural gas contribute less than 6% (2006) of Dubai’s US $ 37 billion economy (2005).
My reaction to this also sort-of surprises me, because it doesn’t have much to do with Dubai itself. Here we are in the USA in a presidential election year where nearly everyone I know is unhappy with all three candidates, and the important issue in public debate seems to be how much of the treasury each candidate is going to hand out to his supporters.
Where is the candidate who says: “We are going to build a business climate in America that will make Dubai look like Soviet-era Bulgaria. With the help of Congress, I will ensure that changes to the federal tax law and the regulation of business at the federal level will make doing business in America irresistable to productive people and organizations the world over. Innovation will be rewarded with profits, not repressive taxation and red tape. Our people have too long suffered under a monstrous meddlesome federal bureaucracy built from the malignant remains of the New Deal. I will cast off the senseless yoke of government that has harnessed our great people for decades, and our great nation will again be first in liberty and prosperity.”
Instead, the “right-est” candidate of the bunch, for whom I am certainly going to vote, is lately talking about how “we” (meaning the taxpayers) have to “do something” (meaning earn less money and pay more taxes) about “global warming” (meaning to transfer wealth from the productive to the non-productive).
Sigh.
Wonder what the gun laws are like in Dubai? (A little Googling says: not good. I’m guessing that in reality it’s like the good ol’ boy system we had here in the bad old days, where your ability to go armed depended on who you knew.)
