Looking for an angle - political crises and civil war in Myanmar fail to interfere with free market developments

National Review, August 29, 1994 by Rob Long

The new entrepreneurs of Burma are not party apparatchiks or university-educated elites. They are horse-cart drivers and lacquerware craftsmen, auto mechanics and fast-talking importers. They are, simply put, operators. They aren't prosperous, but they have something better: the hope of prosperity. In the government-sponsored English-language magazine Today, aimed at the business investor, SLORC comes surprisingly clean: Like other countries that embraced the socialist system, it explains, we wanted to attain accelerated economic growth coupled with equitable distribution of income. We did not reckon with the nature of Homo sapiens, which was, like that of other species, generally self-seeking and which tended to have no inclination to hard work without the promise of attractive rewards.

Strolling through Rangoon in the cool of the evening, you come across the Sule Pagoda, smack in the center of town. The after-work crowd throngs through, ambling along in the traditional clockwise path around the pagoda, stopping once or twice at a favorite Buddha image to pray. It is a typical Burmese scene: casual and collegial yet deeply religious. Then you see that around the head of each of the four large statues of the Buddha (one faces each of the cardinal points) is a series of garishly colored concentric circles in blinking neon. It's hard not to laugh, harder still not to marvel at how easily Rudyard Kipling is confounded: east may be east, and west may be west, but the twain shall meet, by the light of the neon Buddha.