IRAQI CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM
USA Today reports on Iraqis' entrepreneurial response to post-Saddam conditions:
[M]erchants such as Mazouri already are cashing in. Television sets, refrigerators and boxes of satellite receivers are stacked 10 feet high on the sidewalks of Baghdad's shopping districts. Shoppers who have waited for years to be able to spend their hoarded dollars are out in force.
"When I started in late April, I was receiving one container of DiStar goods per month," Mazouri says. "Now, I am getting five to six containers." Each container holds about 270 television sets or 3,800 satellite receiver units. He says he is grossing $20,000 a day. "All the sales are done in cash."
There was plenty of pent-up demand. Sanctions imposed by the United Nations after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 kept a lot of goods out of the country. Before that, an eight-year war with Iran drained the life from Iraq's economy. For nearly 20 years, there was little to buy. And during three decades of rule by Saddam's Baath Party, virtually all companies were state-owned or state-controlled. In 2001, Iraq's gross domestic product was $27.9 billion, compared with $47.6 billion in 1980.
Since the collapse of Saddam's regime, police Officer Gailan Wahoudi, 31, has bought a new television, a refrigerator and an air conditioner. "It is a new freedom I never had before," he says.
TVs, refrigerators, and air conditioners--Anna Quindlen won't like this news.