My wife and I go to a lot of foreign movies. Not that I have anything against American movies, but my hearing is so poor that unless movies are captioned or subtitled I can’t understand most of the dialogue.
Two recent interesting films we saw came from South Korea: MOTHER and SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER … AND SPRING. The first is a mystery with an unusual twist. The second is Buddhist inspired, slow but kind of fascinating.
All of which leads me to a blog lesson for today, experiments in history.
Japan occupied and made Korea a part of the Japanese Empire in 1911. After Japan surrendered to end the 2nd World War in 1945, the Korean peninsula was occupied by Soviet armies in the north and U.S. armies in the south. The occupying armies set the 38th Parallel as an arbitrary dividing line between Soviet-dominated North Korea and U.S.-dominated South Korea.
In 1947 North Korea invaded South Korea with the intention of making the entire peninsula a communist country. President Truman got United Nations backing and went to war to defend South Korea.
Eventually the war ended in a stalemate with an armistice that divided Korea again at the 38th parallel, just where it was before the war began (and where it still is today.). This sometimes “forgotten” war (Truman called it a “police action,” not a war) cost the US over 50,000 lives and set a pattern that was repeated 20 years later in Southeast Asia when a communist North Vietnam attacked U.S. supported South Vietnam.
Even though the Korean “police action” ended in a military stalemate, the stalemate represented a significant victory for South Korea and a disaster for North Korea over the next 50 years. In a sense it was also as close to a controlled experiment as you can get in recent history.
Before the war the two Koreas were roughly equal in wealth and poverty. South Korea had more people, North Korea had more land, neither had much ethnic diversity. North Korea had more natural resources. South Korea had a somewhat warmer climate and more agriculture. Both had access to the sea. North Korea benefited from heavy subsidies from China and the Soviet Union after the armistice. South Korea benefited from United States aid, but to a lesser extent.
The major variable difference over the next 50 years was the government. In one case, North Korea, the government was a command-economy socialist dictatorship. In the other case, South Korea, the government began as a free-market authoritarian dictatorship but eventually evolved into a free-market liberal democracy. After 50 years the results of this real-life “experiment” were startling.
The gross national product per capita today is around $900 in North Korea, over $13,000 in South Korea. In North Korea, one of only two Marxist-Leninist communist countries in the 21st century (the other is Cuba), up to 2 million people died of famine and starvation in the 1990s. That was out of a total population of 22 million. The life of the survivors was in the words of one survivor “worse than a pig’s life in China.” South Korea today has, like the United States, a surplus of dieters.
South Korea is a full member of the United Nations, has the fourth largest economy in Asia, the 15th largest in the world, and is a major producer and exporter of automobiles, ships, electronics, robotics and petrochemicals. North Korean exports are meager, mostly minerals and military weapons. On the Index of Economic Freedom for 2007 North Korea came out last, 157th out of 157 measured countries. (Cuba was second to last, number 156 out of 157.) South Korea came out a respectable number 36, better than Israel, number 37, but worse than Norway, number 30.
North Korea does have a larger military than South Korea and is said to be developing first strike capabilities for nuclear bomb attacks using long range missiles. South Korea is exporting Hyundai automobiles known for superior safety and good gas mileage. And interesting movies.
Conclusion: Free-market win-win capitalism works for people, prosperity and culture. Command-economy zero-sum socialism works for the military but not so well for people, prosperity and culture.
To me this is still one more piece of evidence, if more is necessary, that socialism is inferior to capitalism. Unfortunately in practice there is a major problem. As the dedicated socialist George Bernard Shaw once quipped: “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.”
Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President
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P.P.S. For more on the connections between capitalism and democracy see our well-reviewed program CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY. For more on the history of democracy see DEMOCRACY IN WORLD HISTORY.