Socialism ruining Iranian economy, public support for Ahmadinejad fading

Iran curses Ahmadinejad over petrol rationing | International News | News | Telegraph :

"'We have hard-working shopkeepers in our neighbourhood from whom I get important economic information,' he [President Ahmadinejad] told Iranian newspapers recently. 'For example, there is an honourable butcher in our neighbourhood who is aware of all the problems.'"

Reminds me of Jimmy Carter getting advice on nuclear war from his daughter. No wonder Iran's economy is in a shambles. By the way, The Telegraph interviewed neighborhood shopkeepers but was unable to find that perspicacious butcher the president relies upon.

The article also notes that critics have labeled as "Stalinist" Ahmadinejad's promise to spend a billion dollars on steel, cement and petrochemical plants in the economically depressed eastern part of the country to create a million jobs.

This is preposterous on several levels. First, $1,000 per job is way too little money in such capital-intensive industries. Second, it takes a lot of infrastructure to bring in raw materials (the article says the nearest iron mines are 200 miles from the steel plant) and get finished product out. Third, this single project is supposed to suck up more than a third of the entire county's unemployment even though it occurs in one of its least populous regions and the country already faces a shortage of skilled labor of the sort such facilities require.

Ahmadinejad is supposed to be an engineer (Ph.D. in transportation engineering and planning), surely this all has occurred to him. Of course, after more than a decade in political office, maybe he's not thinking past his 2009 re-election campaign.

The current five-year plan of Iran seems as unreasonable as the socialist planning that stagnated India for decades. It is fitting, then, that current Iranian humor reflects the sort of cynicism in the old Soviet Union where a common saying was "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

Here's a sample of the reaction to the petrol price hike making the rounds as a text message on Iranian's cell phones (the samizdat of the new millenium):

"On the orders of President Ahmadinejad," read one, "those who are short of petrol can have a ride on the 17 million donkeys who voted for him."