They
are beautiful and relatively clean looking. Though they often push
the envelope in regards to what might be considered too risque to be
shown on television (as has been written about expertly in this
article
in The Grand Narrative), for the most part, they appear
non-threatening and they try their hardest to be as inoffensive as
humanly possible. And occasionally, some of them will actually be
talented.
That
is K-Pop and K-Drama in a nutshell. In all fairness, this
description probably fits almost every mainstream entertainer from
all around the world.
With
the occasional oddity that slips through the cracks once in a while
(read, Psy),
these are the criteria that wannabe superstars have to meet in order
to be part of the Korean Wave. When I say “Korean Wave,”
however, I am referring to it as the marketing
tool that the government uses in order to sell a sugarcoated image of
Korea to the rest of the world to either attract tourists or other
kind of Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs).
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However,
it is important to clarify that I do not mean to say that those
entertainers would not be successful at all without government
support. It should be noted that companies like YG, JYP, and SM
Entertainment are for-profit private entities, albeit in bed with the
government. With or without government assitance, however, they will
continue to produce what sells. And if there were no demand for
K-Pop or K-Dramas in their current form, you can bet your mother’s
pension that they would stop producing it.
The
Korean government’s financial
aiding
of the K-Entertainment industry, however, is not for domestic
consumption. It is without question that government regulation
of the industry in the past
was for the specific purpose of weeding out “subversive”
elements, aka censorship. Although vestiges
of that era
still remains to this day, government meddling in the entertainment
industry today is mostly geared towards the goal of exporting it.
And,
according to this article
in Soompi,
business
is booming!
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| PARTY TIME!!! Image Source |
So
has the government’s involvement in the industry paid off? It
would be difficult to disagree. After all, US$106 million in the
first three months of the fiscal year is no small change. Those
earnings are very real. On top of that, considering the fact that
the financial successes of the entertainment industry also means that
it was (partially) successful at selling its goods overseas, that
means that the number of tourists visiting Korea will likely increase
as well. And there will certainly be shop owners, big and small, who
will never complain about that. If nothing else, it has at the very
least succeeded in increasing people’s awareness of Korea. There
isn’t even a shadow of a doubt that all of this was the
government’s end goal all along.
More
business, more tourists, and more profits! How could anyone complain
about that? It appears that I may have to swallow my pride and
accept that government interference in the private sector has
produced marvelous results.
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But
has it really?
In
1850, a French economist named Frédéric
Bastiat
(pronounced Bas-tee-aa) wrote an essay
titled “That
Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen.”
In this essay, Bastiat wrote what he was going to be best known for
– The
Parable of the Broken Window,
which later began to be referred to as the Broken Window Fallacy.
Basically,
this is how the parable goes:
A
young boy in a village breaks a window pane in his father’s shop.
A crowd gathers around and they try to look at the bright side of
things. They say that now that the window has been broken, the
shopkeeper will have to spend money to pay a glazier to replace the
broken window. That glazier will then be able to use that money to
buy himself a loaf of bread from the baker. The baker then can use
that money to buy a pair of shoes from the shoemaker. And it goes on
and on.
So
the crowd takes pleasure at the thought of this. As far as they are
concerned, this young boy who broke his father’s window has helped
to stimulate business in the village.
But
the shopkeeper who had his window broken is not happy. He chastises
them and says that they are all being silly. If his window had not
been broken, he would have been able to use his money to buy a new
suit from the tailor. The tailor would have then used that money to
buy meat from the butcher. And it would have gone on and on.
In
other words, had the window not been broken, the local economy would
have gained a new suit. But now that the window has been broken, the
local economy has gained nothing. It has merely had a window
replaced.
The
problem was that the crowd was only able to see what was visible –
actual costs and benefits. They could not see the unseen, the
what-might-have-been, aka opportunity costs.
So
what does this 164-year-old essay have to do with the Korean
government’s financing of the entertainment industry? Everything!
Firstly,
the only money that a government has is the money that it collects
from the people via taxes. Therefore, when the goverment collates
all that tax monies that it has scraped from the people, all the way
from Seoul to Jejudo, it should not surprise anyone that there is a
significant amount of money. And when a chunk of that significant
amount of money is given to one particular person or group, such as
the entertainment industry, it should also come as no surpise if the
recipients of that money become quite rich all of a sudden.
But
what are the hidden costs? The what-might-have-been? Do those
benefits cost nothing? It has to be remembered that the taxpayers,
from whom that money came from in the first place, are now poorer by
exactly that much money. Can you picture the billions or even
trillions of interconnected economic activity that would have
occurred had millions of taxpayers not been deprived of their money
to fund this
special interest group the entertainment industry?
To
get a small glimpse of what billions of economic interconnections look like,
watch this video.
If
you actually can picture it, you’re on drugs. Unless we develop a
way to look into parallel universes, there is no real way to
calculate the economic costs and benefits of things that never occurred.
Yes,
YG, JYP, and SM Entertainment have certainly benefited. The singers
and performers have gained fame, notoriety, and riches. The
executives have gained massive wealth. Yes, some shopkeepers have
certainly benefited from the arrival of tourists. But at what cost?
Does
it make sense to deprive so many people of their money in order to
finance an already highly profitable industry? Is it just?
I
know what I think. What about you?
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| That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen Image Source |
