Stabilizing people’s lives

Start by knowing correct reasons of past failures

For one, surveys show that the majority of voters want governmental change but the ruling party candidate, Park Geun-hye, is enjoying the highest ratings in the polls. This is largely because Park has successfully kept her distance from the unpopular President Lee Myung-bak by acting as an “oppositionist” within the ruling party.

Or so say most commentators. But is this analysis fair, or even correct? We doubt it.

On Sunday, Park continued to criticize the Lee administration for failing to stabilize people’s livelihoods by adhering to the old paradigm of “quantitative growth.” Without presenting alternative ideas, she then said, “I will be the president who makes people’s lives the top priority.”

However, as far as we know, Lee has only practiced what Park, his rival in the ruling party’s primary five years ago, preached in her economic pledge summed up by three “Rs” ― reducing taxes, relaxing regulations (mainly for big businesses) and re-establishing the rule of law (toughening crackdowns on protesting workers). So Park’s denunciation of Lee is a denial of her former self.

Park’s campaigners say the conservative candidate is no longer what she was in 2007. This seemed true when she preempted the “economic democratization” issue ahead of her liberal rivals earlier this year.

But it didn’t take long for Park to recede to a “two-track” policy, which her camp says is aimed at pursuing both reform and growth but critics see as a drastic setback from tackling the nation’s biggest economic issue ― how to rein in economic concentration on a handful of family-controlled conglomerates and ensure fairer redistribution of the fruits of economic development with numerous small businesses and the self-employed.

Kim Jong-in, Park’s advisor on chaebol reform, flatly said that the candidate’s own lack of understanding about economic democratization and most of her pro-chaebol aides have put her back on an outdated growth track. Little wonder that Park, daughter of former President Park Chung-hee who first set Korea’s economy to be a chaebol-led, export-oriented expansion model, made the wrong diagnosis as to the reason of economic polarization under the liberal Roh Moo-hyun administration by attributing it to Roh’s waste of time to rectify ideological and historical distortions.

Yet everybody knows Roh’s economic failure was due to his introduction, or inheritance, of neo-liberalistic policies by succumbing to the tyrannical power of the market, or more concretely, the chaebol. So he sharply increased the number of temporary workers under the pretext of softening labor market rigidity, abandoned the state’s function as a public provider of basic services by, for instance, trying to privatize health care, and turned the entire nation into a paradise for property speculators. His anxiety to conclude a free trade accord with the U.S., while widening markets for large exporters, also sped up the widening of the income gap.

So any real policies for the working-class should aim at curbing market tyranny through government intervention, and rebuilding the relationship among different players within the market in ways to stimulate domestic demand by bolstering smaller businesses.

If Park talks about people’s livelihoods without even going this far, it will appear as little more than an occasional feigning of generosity. <The Korea Times/most standards, this is a strange election indeed.>