The story of a weeping island…Sri Lanka’s lamentable limp towards progress
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendran yesterday said an investigation was being conducted into the materials linked to the Panama Papers and Sri Lankans said to possess offshore accounts. However he said the authenticity of the so called leaks was doubtful and therefore he couldn’t reveal the names of any individuals due to privacy laws.
2016-04-13
The roads look narrower than they really are. It’s the optics. Not that they have shrunk in their measure; the traffic has increased to such a choking level, once broad-looking motorways can no longer accommodate the daily-increasing numbers of vehicles, two-wheelers, three-wheelers and four-wheelers are all competing for the same narrow space. Honking kills you and the congestion chokes every breathing person in or on these moving wheels; humanity’s busy schedules keep getting busier and the roadways look more like parking lots. The effects of the free-market economy are taking their toll.
When one adds the expansion of the human population into the mix, the choking process assumes its own destructive dimensions. Nobel laureate Pearl S Buck said “when man demands no more the earth too shall die”. Of course, Buck expressed this in the context of the suffocating effects the Chinese policies had, both on the economy and society, at the time. Nevertheless, the latter part of the Twentieth Century and the last one and half decades of this Century in Sri Lanka have proven beyond doubt that an unregulated marketplace, if left alone to the vultures of the capitalist class of businessmen, would be disastrous to a country as well to a majority of its citizens.
What was ushered in 1977 by the J R Jayewardene Government was a brutal necessity. The ’70 to ’77 Government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike along with the left parties ran the Sri Lankan economy into the ground. Instead of expanding the size of the economic ‘cake’ so that more pieces could be cut, the leftist polices of the ’70 to ’77 Government virtually shrank the economy and started cutting smaller pieces. Populist economic policies carried the day during the 1970 election campaign (rice from the moon proclamation by Mrs. Bandaranaike etc.); once in power, the obsolete Marxist economic policies and doctrinaire approach to the country’s burning issues overtook any rational and realistic adoption of policies and principles. The great experimentation of the ‘Double Doctor’ aka N M Perera failed miserably.
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“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
~George Bernard Shaw
Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendran yesterday said an investigation was being conducted into the materials linked to the Panama Papers and Sri Lankans said to possess offshore accounts. However he said the authenticity of the so called leaks was doubtful and therefore he couldn’t reveal the names of any individuals due to privacy laws.
Pic by Lasantha Kumara
2016-04-13
The roads look narrower than they really are. It’s the optics. Not that they have shrunk in their measure; the traffic has increased to such a choking level, once broad-looking motorways can no longer accommodate the daily-increasing numbers of vehicles, two-wheelers, three-wheelers and four-wheelers are all competing for the same narrow space. Honking kills you and the congestion chokes every breathing person in or on these moving wheels; humanity’s busy schedules keep getting busier and the roadways look more like parking lots. The effects of the free-market economy are taking their toll.When one adds the expansion of the human population into the mix, the choking process assumes its own destructive dimensions. Nobel laureate Pearl S Buck said “when man demands no more the earth too shall die”. Of course, Buck expressed this in the context of the suffocating effects the Chinese policies had, both on the economy and society, at the time. Nevertheless, the latter part of the Twentieth Century and the last one and half decades of this Century in Sri Lanka have proven beyond doubt that an unregulated marketplace, if left alone to the vultures of the capitalist class of businessmen, would be disastrous to a country as well to a majority of its citizens.
What was ushered in 1977 by the J R Jayewardene Government was a brutal necessity. The ’70 to ’77 Government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike along with the left parties ran the Sri Lankan economy into the ground. Instead of expanding the size of the economic ‘cake’ so that more pieces could be cut, the leftist polices of the ’70 to ’77 Government virtually shrank the economy and started cutting smaller pieces. Populist economic policies carried the day during the 1970 election campaign (rice from the moon proclamation by Mrs. Bandaranaike etc.); once in power, the obsolete Marxist economic policies and doctrinaire approach to the country’s burning issues overtook any rational and realistic adoption of policies and principles. The great experimentation of the ‘Double Doctor’ aka N M Perera failed miserably.
