Tag: South Korea

With KMT Poised For Defeat In Taiwan’s Next Presidential Election, Its Supporters Extol The “Virtues” Of Dictatorship Once Again

The aura of Loserdom is strong with this one:

Taiwan's China Post declares that autocracy works under "wise" leadership

The paper's argument rests upon three examples: Singapore, China and South Korea.

With regards to the first country, it must be asked: If autocracy in Singapore works so well, why do over half its citizens wish to emigrate? Is it possible there's something Singaporeans know about Singapore that the China Post does not?

Perish the thought. The people can NEVER know more than their would-be masters.

As for China, it's telling that the Post omitted any defense of the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party's Nazi-like policy of exterminating religious minorities for the purpose of organ harvesting. (But how splendid though, that the Butchers of Beijing make the cattle cars to their ghoulish death camps run on time.)

Lastly, we come to South Korea, which represents a full third of the author's defense of autocracy:

South Korea is another case in point…The free economic zones promulgated by the government have won support from the public majority, and are en route to attracting more foreign investment.

That would be an admirable achievement for autocracy…if indeed it was an autocracy that had conceived and implemented it!

(The facts however, show that the first of South Korea's economic zones was set up in 2003. At which time, Korea was a democracy…)

Welcome back from your operation, Joe Hung. It's good to see the quality of your columns has not suffered despite your convalescence: rest assured, they are as error-riddled and badly-argued when their author ingests mind-altering pain medication as when he does not.

Unpleasant Prediction

I hope Tyler Cowen is wrong about this, but…

In Asia, the most likely future candidate for this problem [economic regression] is Taiwan, where real wages were largely stagnant from 2000 to 2011. In 2012, Taiwan’s trend was even more disturbing: Its economy grew 1.3 percent, but real wages fell 1.6 percent, both adjusted for inflation. Taiwanese capital has flowed into China, creating a new class of Taiwanese millionaires but hollowing out the country’s manufacturing base as capital was reallocated to the mainland.

There is an anti-democratic camp in Taiwan which blames the introduction of democracy itself for the country's problems – insinuating that Taiwan would be better off under a KMT autocracy or martial law. This appears to be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, as the experience of South Korea plainly shows:

South Korea's GDP (nominal) growth from 1960 to 2007. A drastic increase in GDP coincides with the introduction of democracy in that country.

(Graph of South Korea's nominal GDP from Wikimedia.org)

Two Asian countries (Taiwan and South Korea) both democratized at roughly the same time, and yet their economic paths after democratization were very different. To my mind, the chief difference between the two is that South Korea didn't leave its own industry to wither on the vine while flooding Communist China with investment capital.

Taiwan, unfortunately, did.

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ChiCom-ikaze Gets Just Reward

Glub, glub, glub.

But is there any particular reason for the Chinese Empire to violate international law by sending an armada of 50 fishing trawlers into South Korean waters?

Oh, I forget myself.  All your resources are belong to us.

 (YouTube link here)