The Minimum Wage: It doesn't help, but actually hurts the poor

On June 15^th 2013, the Hankyoreh reported that a group of part-time workers held a protest outside the Korea Employers’ Federation building in Seoul’s Mapo district during the Minimum Wage Committee’s meeting. The protesters called for a minimum wage of ₩10,000 per hour (about US$9.50).

Source: http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/591936.html

The arguments that are laid out to increase minimum wage rates are all too familiar: low-income earners cannot keep pace with the rate of inflation, people must be guaranteed a livable wage so that they may “live with dignity,” etc.

Although difficult to not sympathize with, these arguments are, in effect, emotional arguments, which, when studied rationally, people will be able to see that they do not achieve their intended goals. In fact, these laws, when put into effect, actually make things worse, especially for those that the laws were designed to help in the first place.

One of the first lessons that one learns in Basic Economics is that the price of goods and services is determined by the level of supply and demand. At some point, the level of supply of and demand for goods meet and this point is known as the equilibrium point. The equilibrium point, ceteris paribus, determines the price at which sellers are willing to supply goods and consumers are willing to pay for goods. If the price is artificially set above the equilibrium point, then suppliers wanting to maximize profits will produce more of the goods but the consumers will not be able to afford them. This leads to a surplus of unsold goods. On the other hand, if the price is artificially set below the equilibrium point, then suppliers who feel that they might not even be able to recover their initial investments will produce less of the goods whereas the consumers, who can now afford more, will demand for more of the goods. This leads to a shortage of goods.

Obligatory economic graph showing supply and demand curves and the equilibrium point
Source:  http://realintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/supplydemand-graph.gif

This seems obvious enough and most people can recognize this supply-demand mechanism. This mechanism is what determines the price of everything, including the price of labor.

We don't particularly enjoy thinking of ourselves as economic commodities. We are, after all, human beings; each with our own sets of dreams, hopes, and fears. However, labor is indeed an economic commodity and what we call “wages” is, in fact, the cost of labor.

Going back to the supply-demand mechanism, when we look at a neat economic chart, it becomes very clear that a minimum (known as a price floor in economic parlance) leads to a surplus of unsold labor aka more unemployed people than there would be had there been market-determined wage rates instead.

I shall attempt to explain how this surplus comes about.

Some economists will argue that when wages are artificially raised, businesses will simply ‘shift’ the increased costs to consumers in the form of higher prices, which leads to a general increase in the price of most, if not all, commodities. This is a type cost-push inflation argument. This does NOT generally occur.

Businesses do raise prices when faced with inflation (to explain what inflation really is and its causes requires another very long essay of its own) but for the most part, businesses do not like to raise prices. Raising prices tends to make businesses less competitive, especially if they have to compete with foreign imports or operate within highly saturated markets.

Cost-push inflation is a theory proposed by some economists who subscribe to the idea that businesses maximize their profits by charging highest possible prices (within limits that allow businesses to maximize profits while at the same time remain competitive). This is a fallacy. In reality, businesses do not maximize profits by charging highest possible prices. They do so by minimizing costs.

Let's take Starbucks Coffee, Angel-in-Us Coffee, and Tom N Tom’s Coffee for example. All three businesses sell nearly identical goods and services. Should any one of those businesses raises its prices, there are other coffee franchises (not to mention the thousands of other cafes that exist) that customers can choose to patronize instead. Therefore, in order to remain competitive and maximize profits, instead of charging highest possible prices, businesses have to minimize production costs via wholesale buying of supplies and equipment, outsourcing transportation needs, etc.

Wholesale looks as boring as it sounds
Source: http://www.hahebo.com/h4_hahebo/upload/3019opkoper_opkoper.jpg?w=575&h=252&c=C&zw=0

So let’s assume that the protesters get what they want and the minimum wage is raised. Would this affect large corporations like Starbucks or Angel-in-Us? Yes, it would. Unless heavily dependent on machine labor, most businesses almost always cite labor as its biggest cost. However, these large corporations are very efficient businesses.

(By “efficient,” I don't mean that large corporations are somehow more hardworking than small businesses. I mean it strictly in the economic sense of the word, ie. economies of scale aka ability to minimize production costs.)

This means that large corporations can absorb higher wage rates into their production costs and still maintain very high profit margins without having to lay off a significant number of their workers or charge significantly higher prices to their customers. The same cannot be said of smaller, less efficient businesses like, say, your local fair trade-supporting organic coffee shop . That less efficient coffee shop will have no choice but to lay off workers in order to stay competitive against corporate competitors such as Starbucks; and if that option is unavailable, worst-case scenario, it will have to go out of business.

In short, the minimum wage affects small businesses negatively more than they do large corporations. By forcing businesses to pay a minimum wage that might be higher than what businesses can afford, the government will cause more unemployment via foreclosures of smaller marginal businesses and thus compel more people to rely on government handouts, which is the exact opposite of the these laws’ intended objectives.

Unfortunately, the story doesn't end there. As a result of the wage increase, people who work in corporations will be relatively well-off and union workers, whose union bosses always make sure that their members’ wages are almost always placed above the average Consumer Price Index, will also be relatively well-off.

But what about marginal workers? Who are marginal workers? Take your pick: high school dropouts, college dropouts, teen moms, ethnic minorities, immigrants, the disabled, juvenile delinquents, parolees, etc.

For reasons that are too numerous to speculate, whether the reasons are justifiable or not, businesses tend to avoid hiring these workers because of the risks that are perceived to be associated with them. This means that even under normal circumstances, businesses are less willing to employ them and even if businesses do employ them, they would only do so on a lower-than-market wage rate. The minimum wage would, in effect, artificially inflate the cost of hiring such risky marginal workers for businesses, which would transform these marginal workers into unemployable workers, thus inadvertently causing the poor to stay poor. Again, this is the exact opposite of these laws’ intended objectives.

Passing laws with unintended consequences since Day 1
Source: http://www1.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/Canadian+Prime+Minister+Stephen+Harper+Visits+twU0KcYTOmhl.jpg

So why do people like those protesters support such laws? There are a number of reasons.

Firstly, people oftentimes make the mistake of equating wealth with money. Wealth is not, in fact, money. Real wealth, all mushiness aside, are the goods and services that we can buy. Money is merely the medium of exchange that is used to buy these goods and services. People make the mistake of thinking that the more money we have, the wealthier we are but this is simply not true unless there is a proportionally greater increase in the production of goods and services that we can buy with that increased income.

If we have more money but still have the same set of goods and services that we can buy, yes, we will FEEL richer but in the long-run, our increased income will not be able to buy more than what reality allows us to buy. In fact, due to inflationary pressures, our purchasing power will, at best, stay the same or, at worst, depreciate.

Secondly, it is my belief that people’s emotional faculties are more highly developed than their rational faculties. History has shown repeatedly that we cannot eradicate poverty by legislative fiat or just by simply throwing money at the poor. Governments have pursued anti-poverty programs for as long as governments have been around and each and every last one of them has failed.  Raising the minimum wage in the past did nothing to alleviate poverty.  There is no reason to believe that raising the hourly minimum wage to ₩10,000 or ₩1,000,000 will alleviate poverty either.

Again, we're not talking about the price of diamonds or fancy sports cars. Those are just things. We're talking about ourselves – humanity – in all our beauty, ugliness, glory, shame, triumphs, failures, joys, sorrows, hopes, fears, etc. In our pride and vanity, both deservingly and undeservingly, we become emotional and spit out half-baked pseudo-economic statements such as “the market-determined wage rate is too low in a free market.”

At the end of the day, labor, which is merely one of the near infinite number of goods and services that we buy and sell, no matter how personal it is to us, is merely yet another economic commodity that must obey the fundamental rule of supply and demand.

I understand where the desire for the minimum wage comes from. We wish to improve our own standard of living and also help the poor. By supporting and enacting these policies, however, we will only hurt ourselves. In order to avoid hurting our own economic interests, we ought to be as rational as possible and instead of judging government policies based on their intentions, we ought to judge them based on their actual results.

If we really wish to improve our economic condition and standard of living, instead of trying to artificially raise wages by legislative fiat, we should have the government intrude less on businesses and leave the free market, aka us, to function on its own independent will.

Source: http://www.aei-ideas.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/PayneMinWage.jpg

Extra Credits for Korean Military Servicemen?

On June 20^th 2013, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, along with female lawmakers from the ruling Saenuri Party, blocked the Defense Ministry’s latest proposal to give extra credits to male job seekers who completed their compulsory military service. The reason given by the Ministry of Gender Equality was that the incentives that were proposed by the Defense Ministry, if passed, would have infringed on the rights of women and the disabled.

Article 39, Section 1 of the Republic of Korea Constitution states: “All citizens have the duty of national defense under the conditions as prescribed by law.”

In its current interpretation, “all citizens... prescribed by law” means that all able-bodied men between the ages of 18 to 35 must serve in the military. Although women can certainly choose to enlist, women are not subjected to the draft. Whereas men who are conscripted (unlike those who choose to become non-commissioned officers after they complete their minimum military service or those who go through the ROTC route or those who graduate from any of the military academies) start their military careers as privates, women who choose to enlist start their military careers as either staff sergeants or second lieutenants.

I myself was conscripted and served in the Republic of Korea Army from June 2011 to March 2013. For the sake of clarification, I was proud to have served in the Army. Although I still feel like a foreigner in my own country, it doesn’t change the fact that this is, indeed, my country. And as an ardent anti-communist, I was more than willing to do my part to defend my country.

That being said, neither my military service nor the military service that was carried out by any other conscript was voluntary. For twenty-one months (longer for those who served in the past), my life was not mine to live. Regardless of what any conscript may have thought about the matter, it just didn’t matter. From the moment we take our oaths to defend our homeland from enemies, both foreign and domestic, until the day that we are discharged, our lives belong to the government. No one in the Military Manpower Administration asked our opinions on the morality of conscription. No one asked us if we even wanted to be there. We were just there; property of the Republic of Korea government.

Source: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3uxoky/

During those twenty-one months, the government can do with our lives the way it sees fit. And it does. Although I received differentiated monthly paychecks after each promotion, on average, I earned about US$100 per month. For a country whose economy is as developed as Korea’s, you’d think that the government could afford to pay its soldiers a livable wage. However, the thing about a forced conscription is that the government is not compelled to pay very much. When the choice that Korean men face is between twenty-one months of military service for lousy pay or anywhere between eighteen months to three years in prison for refusing to serve as well as being ineligible for employment almost anywhere for being an ex-con or for being a draft dodger, the rational choice becomes obvious quite quickly.

As such, when I read that the Ministry of Gender Equality blocked the proposal to give extra credits to male job seekers who completed their compulsory military service, I became a little irate.

That being said, I had to recognize that I was thinking emotionally and in my experience, such kind of thinking seldom leads to objectivity.

The Ministry of Gender Equality may have been short-sighted in its rationale that those extra credits would have “infringed on the rights of women and the disabled.” However, that does not change the fact that in an economy that is as patriarchal as Korea’s, women do face far more discrimination based on their gender than any civilized society ought to permit.

Despite the fact that President Park Geun-hye is Korea’s first elected female president, there appears to be little to suggest that women are about to break the proverbial glass ceiling. In August 2011, FinanceAsia published a list of the top twenty women in finance in Asia. There wasn’t a single Korean woman on that list. According to the Korea Times, there are only a handful of female chief executive officers (CEOs) among top Korean companies and half of them are daughters of the parent groups’ chairmen.

Of the three hundred seats in the National Assembly, only forty-seven of those seats are held by women. That is a meager 15.7 percent of the seats, a figure that puts Korea in 105^th place in a global ranking of the proportion of women in parliament. This puts Korea with the ranks of Albania, Burkina Faso, and North Korea. Korea has actually gotten worse in this ranking because in 2011, Korea was at 80^th place.

Due to the pressure of long working hours and the lack of maternity support, women between the ages of 25 and 29 made up about at 69.8 percent of the workforce in 2010 while the figure dropped to 54.6 percent for women between the ages of 30 and 34. Furthermore, it is estimated that women earn only about 70 percent of what their male counterparts earn.

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/50242166-ce60-11e2-8313-00144feab7de.html#axzz2WpaLwQHD

While it is true that the government has attempted to help women in the workplace by introducing family-friendly policies such as expanding tax benefits, providing longer maternity leave, and establishing more daycare centers for children of working mothers, it hasn’t changed the fact that women compose a smaller and economically weaker portion of the workforce. This is in spite of the fact that Korea is the fastest aging country in the world combined with the fact that its working-age population is sharply declining.

The most likely reasons behind Korean women’s low participation in the workforce, besides being compelled to stay home to raise children, are Korea’s male-dominated corporate culture, which is reluctant to make significant changes to their working environment; and Korea’s Confucian traditions that have promoted deeply ingrained chauvinism.

When the Defense Ministry proposed to give extra credits to male job seekers who completed their compulsory military service, considering the fact that only men must serve in the military, by definition, those extra credits come at the expense of women. Furthermore, considering the unfair social and cultural upper hand that Korean men already have over women, a barrier which at this time seems almost impossible to cross, it would appear that those extra credits would only help to make an unjust social system remain unjust that much longer.

But what of the argument that it is unfair to only subject men to compulsory military service? Considering the fact that countries like Israel and Norway have extended compulsory military service to women, would it not make sense for Korea to do the same? Would that not make things equal between men and women?

I served alongside women while I was in the Republic of Korea Army. I took orders from female staff sergeants, sergeants first class, second lieutenants, and first lieutenants. My company commander, a captain, was a woman. I even had the rare pleasure of meeting a female lieutenant colonel. As those women chose to enlist, unlike me who only served for twenty-one months, the shortest time that one of those women served was a little under three years. The lieutenant colonel, who is still in the Army, has served for almost thirty years.

Each and every one of them commanded my utmost respect and admiration. That these women exist ought to be a constant source of shame for draft dodgers.

That being said, I cannot bring myself to support the idea of forcing all able-bodied women to serve in the military. Korean women already face far too many hurdles in their lives than they ought to. Unless Korean men are willing to exchange roles with the women, cultural and legal discrimination and all, this might be a good time for us to shut the hell up and soldier on.

Source: http://api.ning.com/files/Dz3XGZp1879J8YxPaku8F-aiW5dWLxSBdhRlBmjPkBtlKurG4yt57CLp7UVqqCNfjELMFG-jU1nGfGnwTQddOQV0oNdjOFq0/soldier_on.jpg

Korean Taxi Blues: The story where there are no good guys

I enjoy watching movies. In the movies, there are the good guys and then there are the bad guys. The bad guy, as per his character, would go about doing something bad – robbing a bank or harassing villagers. That’s when the good guy appears. Upright and moral, he fights the bad guy, saves the day, and gets the girl. When I walk out of the movie theater, I have a smile on my face and at least for a while, the world is all right.

Unfortunately, the real world isn’t so black and white. And that is especially the case when money, special interest groups, and government are involved. They all like to think that they are the good guys but, unfortunately, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

If the Korean government gets its way, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transportation will submit the Taxi Improvement Bill to the National Assembly for approval. If passed, the bill would reduce the number of taxis in Korea by up to 50,000 vehicles over the next five years. The reason that the government gave for this proposed reduction in the number of taxis was “oversupply.”

NO!  Stay with me!  Don't fall asleep just yet.  Economics graphs aren't that boring.  And this one isn't even that hard to understand.  It's really straightforward.  All right, I swear this is the only graph I'll use!  Oh come on!  Really?  You're going to fall asleep and drool on your keyboard?  Oh fine.  Just remember to wipe down your keyboard later.
Source: http://www.amybsells.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/supplydemand.gif

The government came to the conclusion that there was an “oversupply” of taxis when the Ministry discovered that “the number of passengers has decreased by 22 percent over the last 16 years, from 4.9 billion in 1995 to 3.8 billion in 2010, but the number of licensed taxis has increased by 24 percent, from 205,835 to 254,955 in the same time period.”

(I can’t help but wonder if the JoongAng Daily, from where those numbers were cited, actually meant ‘million’ or ‘billion.’)

The government has its reasons for wanting to eliminate this surplus of taxis. For one thing, the Korean government has been aiming to pass “green growth” policies in accordance with its “Low Carbon, Green Growth” agenda since 2008. A reduction in the number of fossil fuel-burning and greenhouse gas-emitting automobiles would reflect that agenda.

Furthermore, considering the fact that Korean taxi drivers have been lobbying and protesting since late last year to be classed as public transportation workers, which would make them liable to receive government subsidies and benefits, the government must have felt compelled to reduce the number of taxis. That is because the only way for the government to grant all those taxi drivers subsidies and benefits, if the government chooses to do so, is for it to either cut spending elsewhere or to hike taxes; neither of which would be popular.

Source: http://static.someecards.com/someecards/usercards/MjAxMy04NzNhOGRlY2QxOWEyNWYz.png

However, the government was the very reason for the “oversupply” of taxis in the first place. The government’s guilt can be summed up in one word – licensing.

In order to become a legal taxi operator in Korea, be they corporate taxis or individually-owned private taxis, taxi operators have to obtain a license from their local governments. Seeing this as an opportunity to buy votes from their constituents, local government officials issued those licenses indiscriminately.

Due to the fact that Korea has an inadequate pension system, senior citizens, who cannot afford to stay retired and have difficulty finding employment in the corporate world due to ageism, have been seeking non-mainstream employment. As a result, more and more middle-aged men and senior citizens have opted to turn their cars into taxis. It is no wonder that there was a far greater increase in the number of privately-owned taxis rather than corporate-owned taxis.

Source: http://sociology-age.wikispaces.com/file/view/ageism3.png/190910702/199x308/ageism3.png

With amoral politicians willingly selling licenses to whoever seeks to become a taxi operator (knowing all the while that they are flooding the market with an excessive number of taxi drivers, which would eventually drive down taxi fares that would reduce taxi operators’ standard of living in the long run) and middle-aged and older citizens purchasing these licenses to earn their income, it was only a matter of time before the taxi industry imploded.

To add serious insult to what is already a grievous injury, the government is promising to compensate taxi drivers who willingly surrender their licenses up to US$11,400 (because the government, in its infinite wisdom, prohibited taxi drivers from selling their licences to other people through the passage of the Passenger Transport Service law) despite the fact that taxi licenses are traded at up to 70 million won (US$62,000) each.

Former US President Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” I wonder if there is a Korean equivalent of this.

Source: http://richardofdanbury.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/governhelp.jpg

As I said earlier, however, there are no good guys in this story. As mentioned earlier, Korean taxi drivers have been lobbying and protesting to be classed as public transportation workers since late last year, which would make them liable to receive government subsidies and benefits.

Although it is true that taxis are ‘public transportation’ as much as buses and trains are, it ought to take a serious amount of fantastic imagination to believe that taxi drivers are public sector workers, aka civil servants. That such a notion was even deliberated in the National Assembly and had to be vetoed by the former Lee Myung-bak administration (only to have taxi drivers seek to have the new government give in to their old demands) just goes to show the sheer depth of intellectual bankruptcy of Korean politics.

That taxi operators as a whole are operating in a saturated market, thus driving down their income, is an undeniable fact. That this was the result of government interference in the industry for the sake of making political gains is also an undeniable fact. However, what is also another undeniable fact is that the only lasting solution to the problem would be to allow the free market to readjust the supply-demand equilibrium.

Yes, that means that those taxi operators who are least successful in their line of business will have to suffer losses and seek gainful employment elsewhere. Demanding government intervention to a government problem, on the other hand, is no lasting solution.

When taxi operators demand that they be counted as public transportation workers, what they are in fact demanding is that taxpayers subsidize their incomes. In other words, they are demanding that Korean citizens help to pay for services that they do not want (as evidenced by the 22 percent decrease in number of passengers) so that taxi operators can continue to operate at a loss by offering cheap fares. They are demanding special privileges at the expense of taxpayers.

I cannot help but be reminded of what Frédéric Bastiat, the nineteenth century French economist, said about government – “The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

So long as the government insists on interfering in the free market, and so long as individuals seek government help for special privileges, problems of this kind in the taxi industry will not disappear and in the end, all we will end up with is financial losses, frustration, and disappointment.

Source: http://twentyfourshadesofpink.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/disappointment-expectation-reality.jpg

Korea's Multicultural Future: The Long Road Ahead

About twenty years ago, Korea was a country that boasted, whether it was something that anyone ought to be proud of or not, of being an ethnically homogeneous country. Starting in the early 2000s, however, that began to change. Today, it is estimated that there are 1.5 million foreign nationals living in Korea; about 3% of the total population. This is a reflection of the economic growth that Korea enjoyed over the past decade. There aren’t many things that are nearly as flattering to any country as much as an increasing number of immigrants.

Of course, foreign nationals’ growing desire to emigrate to Korea is not unrequited; at least within certain sectors of Korea’s society. Due to reasons such as low birth rates among native Koreans and Korea’s rapidly aging population, Korea’s future survival, both economically and socially, depends on immigrants. Ready or not or willing or not, Koreans have no choice but to accept multiculturalism and start to familiarize themselves with a word that many Koreans probably have never heard before – ethnopolitics.

Therein, however, lies the problem. As Representative Jasmine B. Lee, the first non-ethnic Korean and naturalized Korean citizen to be elected to the National Assembly, said in an interview that she gave to Groove Korea Magazine in May 2013, as of right now, there is no real serious study or policy aimed at establishing and, more importantly, maintaining a multicultural society in Korea. According to the same interview that she gave, even the current legal definition of ‘multiculturalism’ appears to leave much to be desired. For instance, if a Korean and a non-Korean are married, they are legally a multicultural family. However, a married couple that does not include a Korean spouse is somehow not a multicultural family.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=457664634318187&set=a.169558873128766.44959.113799725371348&type=1&theater

Regardless of the reasons or the excuses behind Korea’s odious lack of preparation for this significant change in demographics, however, lies the fact that the path toward multiculturalism will be anything but easy. For instance, based on a (somewhat dubious) history that stretches back thousands of years, Korean nationalism, at least in its current form, cannot be divorced from ethnic nationalism. For instance, most foreign nationals who have spent any amount of time with Koreans must have heard on numerous occasions Koreans say that the Korean language is ‘the most scientific’ language in the world without seeming to realize just how chauvinistic they sound.

And of course, racism is a problem in Korea. Anecdotal or otherwise, there are more than enough examples of Koreans behaving badly toward immigrants. A less anecdotal report can be found here.

Not only is multiculturalism desirable, it is necessary for Korea. The challenges are daunting and must be tackled. However, in that Groove Korea interview, Representative Lee stated that one of her concerns is not to be seen as moving too quickly in regards to multicultural issues so as to avoid blowback. Though she did not specify blowback from whom, I assume that it can only mean the ethnic majority Han Koreans. Representative Lee is wise to be cautious.

Though racism is without a doubt a problem in Korea, that is not the same as saying that racist attacks are a problem in Korea. Though there are certainly plenty of examples of unfriendliness, snide remarks, bullying, cyber-bullying, and such, there is, as yet, no evidence to suggest that the level of violent racist attacks against ethnic minorities is significantly higher in Korea than anywhere else. However, due to widely accepted ideas of ethnic nationalism, it is plausible that the number (and perhaps, intensity) of racist attacks could rise in the future.

It is important to remember, however, that latent racism is only animated to become overt racist attacks if the ethnic majority perceives, correctly or not, that the ethnic minority poses a threat. For example, if an ethnic group is perceived to be more prone to engage in criminal behavior, or if an ethnic group is perceived to be gaining political power at the expense of the established ethnic group, or if an ethnic group is perceived to be ‘stealing’ jobs – those will be perceived as threats.

Therefore, in order avoid this kind of blowback, Representative Lee and other multicultural warriors must slowly begin to seek alternative solutions to multicultural solutions – namely, economic solutions – for three reasons. The first is to avoid ethnic blowback. The second is to avoid tepid solutions that are no real solutions at all. The third reason is that only a rise in economic standards of traditionally poorer immigrants (that is not perceived to have come at the expense of others) – will help to bring about genuine acceptance.

Koreans themselves are the perfect example of this. Prior to the early 2000s, most foreign nationals thought of Korea as a country that was only good at producing cheap knock-off goods. Koreans in America were stereotyped as people who ran laundromats and small grocery stores; and if not, the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. And that was assuming that people had even heard of Korea. It wasn’t that long ago when most foreign nationals thought that East Asians comprised of only the Chinese and the Japanese.

Source: http://www.ammoland.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Korean-men-defending-Koreatown-during-the-1992-LA-riot.jpg

Fast forward to 2013 and the world seems to have a greater recognition for Koreans. What was once considered a source of cheap knock-off goods, Korea is now known for Samsung’s smartphones and Hyundai cars, which by the way, are getting much better reviews these days than they did in the past. Korean movie directors and actors are making their mark in Hollywood. President Obama cited South Korea’s education policy and modern infrastructure as things that the United States ought to emulate and referred to South Korea as an important military ally and trading partner in his State of the Union address in 2011. And within the United States, Koreans are almost always cited as the ‘model minority.’

It is economic success that brings respect and silences bullies. Ethnic minorities in Korea must be given the opportunities to improve their own economic conditions. Only then will Koreans truly begin to reassess their racist tendencies.

To become economically independent, however, immigrants need help. Progressives have called for the creation and implementation of anti-discrimination laws. Besides other reasons as to why anti-discrimination laws are a bad idea, especially in the manner that it was proposed in February 2013, the other reason why going the route of an anti-discrimination law at this point in time is precisely what Representative Lee wishes to avoid – blowback.

Therefore, the government, on national and local levels, can and ought to help immigrants in the following two initial ways:

1. Offer legal services to people with visa-related questions and connect them with local businesses, religious institutions, and community groups that are interested in hiring or helping them.
2. Connect low-income immigrant and minority entrepreneurs with lenders who offer loans without collateral. Though their starts would be modest, this is an important first step because in the long-run, an accumulation of successful immigrants, low-wage or otherwise, pay taxes that help to defray the cost of government services.

However, as important as multiculturalism is for Korea’s future, people must not make the mistake of believing that an influx of foreign nationals, immigrants or otherwise, would automatically solve Korea’s economic problems. There is no such guarantee. That is because immigrants are the high-octane fuel that is needed to make an economy grow but they are not the engine of economic growth. Contrary to the popular image of the rugged pioneer who is willing to brave the harsh conditions of the Wild West, most immigrants have no desire to seek out harsh conditions when they can have the choice of living in relative comfort. The engine of economic growth is the economy itself.

John Wayne didn't really specify just HOW scary it can be.
Source:http://www.fullhdwpp.com/wp-content/uploads/John-Wayne-quote_www.fullhdwpp.com_.jpg

In order to attract immigrants as well as make sure that they choose to stay in Korea, the government has to offer them a decent quality of life. It can do so by several means.

1. Gradually wind down and replace Korea’s antiquated ethnic nationalist tendencies. The South Korean military, which has been one of the first to feel the pressure of an aging population with low birth rates, was the first government branch that quietly retired the phrase 민족 (min-jok), which implies ethnicity, and replaced it with 국민 (kook-min), which implies citizenship. The rest of the government must follow suit.
2. As far as public schools are concerned, the Ministry of Education, Science, and, Technology has to offer classes that focus on teaching the Korean language to children of immigrants. Unless the government is willing to have multiple languages be considered national languages, much like the way Singapore does, which appears to be impossible in Korea, the children of immigrants must be taught to read, write, and speak Korean fluently. Languages exist to serve practical purposes and they serve those purposes better the more people in the same society speak the same language. Thus far, Korea has only offered English to be taught in schools as second languages. In order to become a more multicultural society, schools must offer a wider selection of second languages.
3. Create an entrepreneur-friendly climate and keep taxes reasonable. The experience of Korean Americans show that when first-generation immigrants find success through private enterprise, that success allows them to give their children further opportunities in life, which will in turn help them to integrate into Korean society more quickly.

I myself used to be an immigrant. I was born and raised in Brunei but because I was the son of an immigrant, I was never granted citizenship. In fact, I was always reminded that I was an outsider and while I was there, one of the things I heard Bruneians say regularly was “Be grateful that we allow you to live here.” It made me feel like as though the only reason I was alive was because they allowed it.

When I attended college in Wisconsin, aside from a small number of individuals, no one made me feel unwelcome because I wasn’t American (and because I was in Central Wisconsin, neither was I made to feel unwelcome because I wasn’t Caucasian). Though I was not made to feel unwelcome, I was the token Asian friend. What even the most well-meaning friends in Wisconsin seemed to fail to realize was that I didn’t want my ethnicity to matter. I wanted it to be a non-issue. If I were to be respected or liked or despised or ignored, I wanted it to happen as a result of what other people saw in me; not what I looked like.

Though I cannot speak for every person who has ever been a member of an ethnic minority group, I am sure enough to say that I believe that I am not the only one who feels this way – and this includes the immigrants and the non-immigrant foreigners who are currently residing in Korea.

In a country where ethnicity is taken as seriously as it is in Korea, the goal of living in a post-ethnic society appears far fetched. To achieve it, would require the hardest moral and intellectual battle. But isn’t that a magnificent goal to fight for?

Source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYC6V8CXFWx9PFP1YbJI2hgOgU1aTLaiCzCf5kCGCFV6xoAn9SeX5oX-nQtHQ4RN5h7YZ1papYvIvbyE3FojELypkAdIbFdI6xB6y0pfeB4GWIOcwKRDXL7RwF3_ns_FHfb8Wm0mn0g-wL/s1600/No_Racism_by_pincel3d.jpg

The South Korean government's role in soft power and Psy's accidental rise

When Psy made his inexplicable mark on the world’s stage last year with the release of ‘Gangnam Style,’ much of the world that had never heard of or had never been interested in K-pop were suddenly inundated with what much of Asia has already been familiar with for a number of years – the Korean Wave, or hallyu.

Psy’s ascendancy helped K-pop, which had for years originally been a mere domestic response to Korean society being flooded with J-pop (Japanese pop music), suddenly find life of its own outside of Asia. Suddenly, college marching bands from Ohio, Ellen DeGeneres, and Filipino inmates were doing the Gangnam Style.

Psy is a purely accidental international celebrity. Explaining Psy’s international popularity is very difficult. Is it due to unique dance moves, or to a funny music video, or to the whims of the mysterious gods that dictate which viral videos become popular? That answer lies beyond my capabilities. The point is that until the moment he gained his international fame (or notoriety, depending on whom you ask), no one, not even Psy, could have predicted that he was going to become an international household name.

It is no secret that the South Korean government is a major force behind the push to export K-pop around the world. Various government agencies such as the Foreign Ministry or the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism or the Korea Trade Promotion Corporation set aside money in their respective budgets to promote K-pop groups (and their parent organizations) in order to boost Korea’s national image in the world.

The irony, of course, is that Psy’s success came in spite of the South Korean government rather than because of it. Prior to becoming an international celebrity, Psy’s interactions with the South Korean government had been anything but cordial. His music had been banned by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, he had been fined for ‘inappropriate content,’ had been arrested for possession of marijuana, and had been drafted to serve in the military TWICE because he supposedly ‘neglected’ his duties the first time around.

After his new found fame, however, among his accolades that he can boast of is that the Gangnam district named him as its honorary ambassador whereas the South Korean government appointed him as a goodwill ambassador to UNICEF. How quickly past vices and supposed moral failings are forgotten in the shadow of success and fame.

Hypocrisy notwithstanding, Psy, the quintessential bad boy of K-pop had been co-opted by the South Korean government’s hallyu program in its attempt to expand its ‘soft power.’ And what is soft power? Joseph Nye, who originally coined the phrase, defined it as co-optive behavioral power, meaning “getting others to want what you want.”¹

Considering the fact that K-pop seems to be mostly composed of young men who look like anime characters and overly sexed-up young women whose bubble gum pop music and choreographed dance routines that can barely be distinguished from one another, and then applying that to Joseph Nye’s definition of soft power, it becomes very difficult to discern just what it is that the South Korean government wants.

The chaotic mess that is K-pop aside, common sense dictates that the South Korean government’s most probable goals via its soft power outreach is that of expanding international markets for Korea’s exports, to induce more Foreign Direct Investments (FDI), and to attract more tourists. But is the Korean government’s investments in K-pop the way to go?

It goes without saying that in those countries where hallyu is welcomed, the South Korean government may be able to help disseminate and even popularize Korean fashion, music, and movies in such a way that the populates of those targeted countries will eventually come to purchase and consume Korean culture, goods, and services. However, if market expansion for Korean goods is the ultimate aim, does the government need to step in? After all, if profit is the main motive, and it is almost always the main motive of private enterprise, wouldn’t private businesses invest in and sell those things that make market expansion and profit maximization most feasible without having the need for government to engineer sales?

When it comes to other industries such as agriculture, the ethics of trade protectionism or the lack thereof aside, yes, it does make sense for government intervention. However, when it comes to pop culture, an industry whose worldwide sales and distribution are much more difficult to regulate and monitor, it becomes a different story.

Furthermore, the question of necessity aside, the South Korean government’s involvement in promoting K-pop could eventually prove to be counterproductive. Firstly, whenever governments invest in soft power outreach programs, especially of the cultural kind, rightly or wrongly, the project begins to stink of parochialism and chauvinism. Though not related to K-pop per se, this is one of the likely reasons why the “Globalization of Hansik” program, which had been headed by former first lady Kim Yoon-ok, became an utter failure.

Once the perception of parochialism or chauvinism has taken hold, it becomes nearly impossible to escape it. This is because governmental promotion of K-pop rests on the assumption that somehow, government officials, who are mostly middle aged men, know best about how to promote the country overseas and that somehow, what consumers might find interesting or worth consuming becomes a secondary matter.

Due to a sheer accident of geography, Korea is surrounded by giants – Japan, China, and Russia. Korea is the proverbial runt of the litter. To add further insult to injury, more people in the world have heard of and know of impoverished North Korea than affluent South Korea. The gods must have a wicked sense of humor indeed. Therefore, it is understandable that the South Korean government wishes to find proactive solutions to improving Korea’s reputation. However, it has to be remembered that reputation is something that has to be earned; not something that we can simply will into existence.

So how can South Korea improve its reputation? It can only do so by actually improving; in this case, improvement in trade; something which the South Korean government need not incentivize (though it could certainly help with the lowering of trade restrictions). If South Korean businesses, regardless of whatever kind, produce quality goods and services that the rest of the world wants to buy, and there is no evidence to suggest that this is not in the interest of Korean businesses, South Korea’s image will improve over time.

It has to be remembered that until not too long ago, for most Americans, their idea of what Korea looked like was defined by M*A*S*H. Long after the South Korean government ended its near-socialistic five-year economic programs, when the South Korean government was not actively participating in industrial production of goods and services, South Korea’s image of being a backwater dictatorship became slowly replaced by Hyundai cars and Samsung smartphones. However, when the Korean government gets involved in even something as benign as food, when the Korean government promotes Korean food as a healthy alternative to other countries’ food, which by definition implies that other countries’ food is unhealthy, then Korea’s reputation takes two steps back.

In the end, the best means available for South Korea to increase its soft power is for the South Korean government to take a less active role in the promotion of K-pop and allow the country's global image, and the K-pop industry itself, to evolve at its own pace over time. As mentioned earlier, Psy gained international fame and popularity in spite of the South Korean government; not because of it.

Now the government likes him.  How's that for irony?
Source: http://images.theage.com.au/2012/10/03/3683532/vd-Psy-408x264.jpg

1Joseph Nye, Bound To Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (Basic Books, 1990) p. 188.