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Best Korea and Dear Leader's Howitzers
Posts
Right now this would probably be the best thing for North Korea yes. A benevolent dictator who slowly but surely decreases totalitarian aspects of the regime and eventually leads to a dismantling of the North Korean state and a move in by the South, giving them time to take over the reigns.
Just for fun, can I get a citation for that precedent?
Blix. I mean Blix.
Mm... I think the debt would skyrocket, yes, but that doesn't seem like something that would ruin the country. It would be painful, but, well, again, this is the hard road to resolving the North Korea situation, and once north Korea picks itself up, the unified Korea would likely be pretty impressive.
I'm sure there would be some strain on the infrastructure, but I don't see why it would be catastrophic. I'm not sure that severe controls on population movements would be necessary, but they're an option if stability turned out to be a concern.
A problem with statements like "now a third of your population is distinctly malnourished" and "result in the creation of an underclass" is that these are problems that exist now, but they're in an apartheid state, imposed by a criminal leader who prevents them from solving the problems that they're in.
Also, when you say "West and East Germany re-unifying was crippling to the West German economy"... well, that was temporary. Germany's in pretty great shape now. All of this seems like reiterations of the notion that it would be an arduous process, and I don't disagree with that.
I do disagree with the notion that South Korea would somehow collapse. I don't think you'll find a suitable historical analogy to that particular scenario.
To be a precedent someone's gotta go first. One can hope once they get over how fucking awesome military technology is and realize what an impact this could have on Blizzards motivation to finish up Heat of the Swarm.
I agree with this. Various forms of authoritarian state capitalism style mixed economies seems to have worked remarkably well in East Asia in a number of instances.
just a thought really. Though you could look at the Soviet collapse as being a lot faster version of this. I'm simply saying this this would probably be a better option than war.
The problem with war is that it's appealing because there's basically zero risk of me being involved in it, and it seems like maybe - despite it not working all those other times - we could solve a bunch of problems in one shot. And hell, even if I might be involved in it (at some point there was a minor risk of this) - I'd be naive enough to think it'd be a chance to prove my manhood and have stories which would win any internet argument.
The problem is: this has never fucking happened, and to an extent that's depressing since you'd think when a bunch of people die for something we'd actually make a better future.
You don't see how South Korea having to spend more money than they have available to them in order to try and bring stability to the North would ruin the country? You say once the North picks itself up it could help out, but we are talking decades here. If North Korea was a positive aspect of the Korean ecenomy ten years after reunification I would be absolutely staggered. We are talking at least a decade of South Korea essentially propping up a population half as big as it's own. That will almost certainly be devastating.
As for the strain on the infrastructure, if you prevented population movement then yes the South wouldn't be so overstretched. However then you have, again, twenty five milion refugees waiting for someone to help them in the North of the country. That's what it would be. Infrastructure that survived the war would likely be so broken as to be useless, the people, already starving, would probably find themselves in even worse conditions and this is following what would almost certainly be widespread bombing.
If South Korea cannot go in a resolve the situation without getting ruined then there is no point, because at the end of it all that will have happened is that the North Koreans will now be free but still fucked, and the South Koreans will still be free but now fucked. There is no point in going to war with North Korea unless there is a fucking solid gold plan of how you are going to make re-unification work without bankrupting South Korea. This happens every fucking time countries go to war. They think loads about the conflict and how to fight it and how to win it but they don't fucking consider what the effects will be afterwards. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, all money-sinks with no end because of the aftermath. Iraq isn't like it is because the US cocked up the war, it's because they cocked up their administration after the war.
Pretty much. War is a means for an end. It is not an end in itself, it does not solve problems, it merely allows the winner to deal with the problems in the way they choose to. If you don't like how North Korea is run then going to war and kicking ass may seem appealing because straight up, traditional war is a pretty simple concept (destroy them) even if it isn't always easy. But that doesn't make things better for the North Koreans. It just means the South Koreans now have the opportunity to try and deal with their problems. And if they can't without fucking themselves up while doing it there is no point in going to war.
What exactly do you mean by ruin? What does that imply? Somalia? Iraq? Ireland?
They would be vastly different situations. Would South Korea be reduced to a situation like Somalia? Well no, because Somalia has massive issues with tribal violence which South Korea does not have and is highly unlikely to get. Would it be like Ireland is now? Well no, because Ireland is not occupying another country filled with starving refugees.
I would go so far as to say that that situation is not something we really have a comparison to in recent history, apart from European reunification after 1989, most significantly East and West Germany. But even then the situation is different in many ways, most critically in the sheer size of the gap between NK and SK but also because the US pumped money into that situation but are currently having a lot of trouble of their own, so that may not be as viable now. As people have said twenty years later that reunification still has an impact, East Germany is still poorer than the West and their economy had some very serious issues before that, issues that have only recently been dealt with.
This is many magnitudes more serious than East and West Germany. Many magnitudes. We haven't really seen it before, if war and reunification happened now I shudder to think what the aftermath might be. As I said, probably the biggest humanitarian crisis in recent history placed into the hands of a country who simply doesn't have the money to deal with it and whose allies are in very bad financial striaghts.
Yeah, that is a massive difference.
Though the fifty billion seems to be for doubled NK income, which isn't a lot of money at all. It's when they started going for solid percentages of SK income that it started to shoot up.
But not in a good direction.
50 billion gets them to 10%, 1.5 trillion gets them to 50%, and 2-5 trillion gets them to 80%.
Admittedly those estimates are from different sources, but they're not contradictory.
Makes me wonder how the situation would be like if one of Jong-Il's other sons were made successor instead of Nutjob McNutbutter III. By most accounts, his other potential heirs were more moderate in their political and social views than Jong-Un, but I guess it's pointless now to speculate.
Just like America doesn't need to add another war to cock up our economy (and the inevitable occupation and reconstruction), I doubt think most South Koreans want a full scale conflict to cock up theirs. Imagine the sell offs of stocks and the impact of the global economy if shit did happen to go down.
As ever, don't read the comments unless you want a laugh.
Couldn't we like, accidentally poison the crazy one?
ugh the comments. Blatant internet trolling just isn't funny anymore.
North Korea is practicing brinksmanship again. They'll back down in a few weeks once the West caves in to their latest demand.
ECONOMICS TIME
Okay, there are basically two ways to generate economic growth in a hurry. The first is basically factor mobilization - people are working at home (e.g., as housewives); pull them off and put them in the factories. There's an unexploited lake there, go build a hydro dam. 50% of people have a high school education; make that 90%. etc.
The second is productivity improvement - given the same amount of labor and capital, make more stuff. This sort of thing is only achievable through technological progress and better - not merely more, but better - education.
Now the trick is that Stalinism is very good at generating the former - better than any democratic capitalist state, in fact. The reasons should be fairly obvious: it is easy to mobilize labor when you treat your entire population as an army to be ordered about, and it is easy to find funds to create more capital when you can arbitrarily order said population to consume less. And don't get me wrong here, some amount of mobilization is good - but it's the sort of trick you can only do once. You can only hike %employed/population to 70%+ once. Then your growth falls back down to mediocre levels, due to suppressing incentives to innovate.
Roughly speaking, the only reason SK even kept up with NK up till 1970 is tons and tons of US investment via direct aid, grants, IMF loans, and integration into international capital markets (i.e., private lenders). You can see this via the staggering amounts of foreign debt South Korea racked up across the period - domestic saving stayed flat; imports and investment skyrocketed, and if you examine breakdown by sector it is apparent that much of investment when straight toward importing industrial machinery from the West. Instead of mobilizing capital internally (suppress consumption, redirect resources toward creating capital), as North Korea did, South Korea simply took a lot of loans and just bought capital from other countries.
... yes. Yes, it would. But why is that a problem? Development loans so large that they can only be paid off over the better part of a century are hardly unknown.
Don't get me wrong here, it would take decades for quality of life to catch up. If you expect it to happen in a matter of years, you're going to be disappointed. But it would still be a dramatic improvement over what would otherwise occur, namely a postponement of the inevitable problem.
e: I agree with Loren's argument; Solar, if it were the case that South Korea had to rely on its own domestic saving to fund North Korean development, yes, it would find that difficult. But there is no need for it do so. It can borrow from other countries as well.
Taiwan and for that matter South Korea were both dictatorships not too long ago. But perhaps Solar was thinking of the PRC's Deng. Insofar as we agree that peaceful reunification (not takeover by the South) is problematic primarily due to North Korea's insularity and poverty, there is plenty of precedent for economic growth and relative openness under dictatorial rule.
But wishing for a benevolent dictator is nigh useless anyway.
What South Korea had was a brutal military dictatorship comparable to that of Taiwan at the same time or Argentina decades earlier. The ruling junta probably wasn't full of as many brazen robber-barons as that of Taiwan, but even still it was, at times, extremely corrupt (that shouldn't be a surprise), and not particularly conducive to foreign business investment. It's also suggested that, while they promised to carry it out, they were still opposed to crucial measures like Land Reform and slowed its implementation.
The lines diverge in the last one to two decades of the South's military dictatorship (and a decade before the assassination of President Park Chung Hee by the director of the Korean CIA), suggesting that they finally demonstrated they could be competent when they put their minds to it.
Oh it is totally a pipe dream. It's not going to happen.
There was no continuity of government between Rhee and Park; Rhee was replaced with a democratic government which Park then overthrew. Rhee was a strongman who basically continued US military occupation practices; his formal authority was never total and de facto power only established by continually killing members of the opposition - it was a dictatorship, but an illegal one by its own rules; Rhee never consolidated enough power to rewrite them.
Park's ascension to president came with the nominal promise of restoring democracy and economic growth; it was less murderous than Rhee's; instead, Park maintained power by appointing cronies to favored industries (and it is there that the Park government's incentive to generate growth came from). This was helped along by the Park government establishing much more formal powers than Rhee's had.
I daresay it was less "Park was competent where Rhee was not" and more "opposition to Rhee's government was able to prevent him from claiming formal powers, but not able to stop him from having armed thugs shoot them, while opposition to Park's government was more able to protect themselves but unable to prevent Park from gaining formal powers in every aspect of government - and so Park maintained his dictatorship using those powers, staying within nominally democratic rules". And it is the latter which is conducive to growth, even if only because it allows crony-capitalist robber barony. There must be growth before cronies can benefit from it, and patronage of cronies is necessary to maintain grip of a nominally democratic system.
-Countries with an interest in keeping nukes off the black market
-Countries that have to spend militarily to keep Bad Korea in check (primarily SK and USA, but Japan as well)
etc.
If it would be as simple as some people are suggesting to topple Kim and start rolling out economic initiatives, $50-100B doesn't even seem expensive, if stakeholder countries contribute.
It doesn't seem that wages would have to rise to even 60% SK over any short period of time. As long as living conditions are measurably and steadily improving, donated food and supplies are still flowing so that people aren't starving to death, etc, then people will be complacent until you can open the borders to immigration.
The fall of North Korea won't necessarily end the passage of nuclear materials into the black market - if anything, it could actually increase the flow of nuclear material out of NK. In the decade following the collapse of the USSR, the former Soviet states lost at least 40 kilograms of weapons-usable radioactive materials to theft alone. Black marketers interested in radioactive materials (and in the scientists trained in their refinement) will be waiting in the wings once the DPRK shows signs of collapsing. If the DPRK does collapse at any point in the foreseeable future, then during the span of time between the Kims' ouster and full reunification, it will be much more chaotic and prone to looting from within than the post-Soviet states were. The only way to avoid (or, more realistically, minimize) nuclear dissemenation from North Korea is via open and peaceful reunification.
http://www.economist.com/node/16847156
I do think that much the same could be accomplished by a rotating appointed body of leaders picked by South Korea or a consortium of UN interests that would govern until a set period when North Korea would be back on its feet.
North Korea, as it stands, is not a culture where any kind of meaningful democracy should be expected until the population is better educated and has a working economy. Forcing one at this point would only worsen the situation, not too unlike Hamas in Gaza.
-The current situation in NK is awful
-Leaving it that way is an awful thing
-Changing it will be awful, but it's the only way to have a hope of stopping the awfulness at some point in the future
-Nobody outside NK really has the ability to change it (when you include political will as a measure of ability), and nobody with power inside NK wants to change it.
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It doesn't matter; there is no need to equalize income per head in anything less than several decades.
The reason it has to equalize fast is that otherwise norks vote with their feet and look for work in Seoul and southward.
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We can have people from the South move north, too - drop industrial parks in Pyongyang and encourage South Koreans to be employed, as likely, as managers and higher-level staff.
The sheer amount of basic infrastructural upgrading that will occur will entail moving skilled employees northwards anyway, at least initially.
On January 21, 1968, the 31-man Unit 124 of Korean People's Army special forces commandos attempted to assassinate Park and nearly succeeded. They were spotted by four South Korean civilians out cutting wood. After spending several hours trying to convince the civilians of the benefits of communism, the commandos let the civilians free with a stern warning not to notify the police. However, the civilians informed the police that very night.
Footage smuggled out of North Korea.
It is always depressing as hell seeing life in North Korea.