Chang's wise consistency

By Oh Jung-hun

``Chang Ha-joon's foolish consistency,” an impressive article by Casey Lartigue, Jr. on Jan. 1 edition persuaded me to embrace his wise consistency.

According to his view, controlling restraints are taken for granted even though it is a free market because blue skies are not always blue. Writing of the illusory delusion of everything on earth, his argument ostensibly appealed to my sensibilities. His philosophical initiation was logical enough to convince me that there isn't anything pure on earth.

However, we need to classify, visualize, dissect and sort out the hidden truth peddled by free-market ideology and what causes the current global economy to lie in tatters.

Prior to ``23 Things They Don’t Tell you About Capitalism, I read his other work, ``Bad Samaritans" revealing why the affluent countries begin dominating the global economy as underdeveloped countries become, on the contrary, worse off.

I can still remember the phrase of ``Keynesianism for the rich, monetarism for the poor." Korea was a representative model to support this logic. When Korea was in its biggest-ever financial crisis in 1997, the IMF allowed Korea to run budget deficits equivalent to only 0.8 percent of GDP. Thus, many Koreans campaigned for voluntary austerity measures, including serving smaller meals, even donating solid gold from their homes to compensate for the depletion of foreign currency.

However, many correspondents and foreign economists in Korea sneered at their stupidity, saying that such action might relentlessly aggravate Korea's economic stagnation. Why did they laugh at Korean's breakthrough? That was because Bad Samaritans have imposed macroeconomic policies on developing countries that seriously prevented them from investing, growing and creating jobs in the long run.

Ironically, since the IMF bail-out, the unemployment rate has trebled. Instead, the number of irregular jobs has soared radically. In this context, ``Bad Samaritans" was a good book that made me recognize why and how developed countries designed global macroeconomic for their benefits.

Likewise, his second work, ``23 Things They Don’t Tell you About Capitalism, enabled me to comprehend why free-market policies rarely make poor countries rich at the macroeconomic level and the extreme polarization of economic sectors is becoming deeper and seemingly irreversible.

Theoretically, the engine of capitalism, based on the free-market system, is obviously dependent on the basis of honest ethics pursued by managers and worker's loyalty to generate surplus profits. However, owners are obsessed with their own greed rather than focusing on entrepreneurial integrity.

Likewise, developed countries should to some degree guarantee the self-reliance of underdeveloped countries' until their nurturing industry comes to maturity. However, they only try to maximize the positive effects of protectionism, by imposing either tariffs or quotas on them.

On the other hand, underdeveloped countries cannot evade these restraints to survive, nor have they enough time to develop nucleus industries for products to have a competitive edge. In spite of these disadvantages, Korea towers as an exceptional country that has cultivated world-wide blue-chip firms in sectors such as steel, ship-building, electronics and other competitive fields.

Jang Ha-joon's two books should be recommended to whoever wants to look beneath the hidden layers of current global economics. Foolish consistency criticized by Lartigue Jr. was too absurd from my own perspective. Of course, there is a minimal difference of each insight in approaching the entities of economic structure and its status quo.

Although referred entities such as the sky or the ocean seem compatible enough to prove his solid foolishness in consistency, indeed, saying "all-or-nothing", there is nevertheless a gap between the philosophical comparison and the economic deadlock in reality which cannot be understood in any other way.

Notwithstanding, Jang tried to reveal the wrong manipulation of the invisible hand. Jang's books were, as it is, a kind of beacon brightening beneath the base covered by the economical unfairness and imbalance coagulated with opacity. In this vein, his concrete interpretation of global crisis starved of money has been as consistent as even non-specialists on economics like me can easily approach.

To put it succinctly, his persuasive perspective is surely enough to understand the duality of capitalism and the free-market.

The writer is a teacher of Somyoung Girls High School in Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province. His email address is dicapripk@hanmail.net.