Covid pushes Asia to embrace big government
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
To put it other way, "Your government shouldn't have enough power to fight an epidemic, because that's too much power" has never been an actual argument in Korea, and (I believe) most of Asia as well. We don't want a small, underpowered government. We want a properly supervised government that uses its power to protect people.
For anyone who wants a summary the Confucius episode of Genius of the Ancient World on Netflix has a good overview.
What’s enough power? A government-mandated lockdown is legally impossible in Japan but they have managed to keep COVID cases within a number that can be handled by their medical system.
The procedures used in NYC aren't drastically different from Singapores', but the key difference is that Manhattan cannot close its borders to the rest of the 50 US States.
When people ask for a strong government in the US, its' within that context. They want a government that could enforce quarantines between different states, locking people into one state or another till the virus burns itself out. That's the way it worked in China, but is legally impossible to do in the US.
The US can have minor quarantines (an apartment, a city block, etc.) but we can't legally quarantine a whole city, much less states.
Centuries of free travel between states has made the borders very porous and mostly just a legal concept. There are so many minor road crossings between, say, New York and Pennsylvania that it would be impossible to secure.
Participating in an underground rave in Singapore would result in lashes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/nyregion/nursing-homes-de...
'A state directive sent thousands of Covid-19 patients into nursing homes'
yep, no difference at all
I think it comes from shallow interpretation of sayings such as "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". I mean it's a catchy saying, but in reality it's just a result of terrible system engineering (in this case the government system) in many places.
It is totally possible to have a powerful government and have that government supervise. In the end there is a clear distinction between "big government" and "authoritarian dictatorship". If your big government devolves into individual dictatorship it just mean the single executive position likely had too much power to begin with.
In fact, similar to companies, it's very well possible to avoid a single dictator CEO even as your company grows large and end up with a large management hierarchy.
Propaganda? What?
> I think it comes from shallow interpretation of sayings such as "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". I mean it's a catchy saying, but in reality it's just a result of terrible system engineering (in this case the government system) in many places.
I'm pretty sure it comes from the enlightenment era and especially the American Revolutionary War. American colonists were never been big fans of the powerful churches and monarchs of Europe they were trying to escape.
> If your big government devolves into individual dictatorship it just mean the single executive position likely had too much power to begin with.
Would you believe me if I told you this very thing was happening across the world in the 1930s and 1940s? And pretty close to home too? Maybe all it takes is enough people to forget history.
Seems like the correct lesson to draw is that the size or power of government doesn't necessarily tell you how much systematic misery and injustice you will find there.
Regarding your claims specifically:
Americans did not hang witches "all the time". Prosecutions for sorcery and witchcraft occurred in the USA in the late 1600s, that's true -- but they all occurred all over Europe into the late 1600s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_England
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_Netherland... (ended trials exceptionally early)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_Finland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_Denmark
In England, the last person prosecuted for witchcraft (thankfully not executed) was Helen Duncan in 1944:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Duncan
Most European kingdoms did not have slavery in Europe; it's in the colonies where all of them established slavery. The US was such a colony. It's perhaps unusual in being a place where slavery was abolished as a result of a war between the ruling inhabitants, as opposed to a slave revolt or something like that. The British followed a more orderly process, though, abolishing slavery in the colonies and then compensating the slave owners out of the treasury.
Slavery was abolished in the English colonies in 1833. That's 32 years before it's abolition in the United States. That might not be the "much longer" that you had in mind.
Are you sure that holds for periods > 100 years?
And it is.
There were nobody to put brakes on Obama's "point, and click" signature strikes, and him signing on, for all intents, and reasons, an extrajudicial assasination orders of US citizens.
If you look at who's funding today's misinformation outfits, you'll find characters from a similar background: libertarian corporatists who implicitly believe a dollar is one vote.
It's not hard to see the continuity and how the marketing works: worship of the entrepreneur, hard work, superstarism. Leading naturally into calls for small government, temporarily embarrassed millionaire syndrome, defining fairness along lines of economic success, etc.
It's a shame we're so unaware of the marketing. It's actually not very difficult to poke through. I think the fact that so many early settlers came for religious reasons (their home states in Europe didn't look kindly on their fundamentalism and fanaticism) set the tone in terms of a people that so easily believes in stories.
East Asians have long operated a comparatively strong state apparatus, a system borrowed from the Qin that goes back about 2200 years, which many scholars will argue is the first truly bureaucratic state. This is one of the central components of a developed country, and certainly of big government, but is no protection against dictators. It certainly never was for China or Japan (or Korea under Japanese rule).
Even the recent history of Korea puts your point about what happens when "...the government abandons its duty to protect people." in doubt, because Rhee was the government. What has tended to balance out the power of the state historically is (a) a sense of law as something independent of the government and binding on it and (b) mechanisms of accountability, like elections, that require large portions of the state apparatus to consider what they are doing in light of public approval.
That Rhee's dictatorship ended only in 1960 is precisely my point - he was soon followed by Park Chung-Hee (killed by his own aide on 1979), who was followed by Chun Doo-Hwan (stepped down on 1988). In other words, the memory of dictatorship is still fresh in many South Koreans alive now - unlike America's revolutionary war, this is too recent (and, not too mention, too inglorious) to be painted over by some kind of PG-13 foundational myth.
So the suggestion that the size of the government has something to do with dictatorship would make many Koreans politely roll their eyes. Right or wrong, our world view is shaped by our experience - and my Korean experience says having a weak government has nothing to do with avoiding tyranny, and in fact is a pretty good predictor for an incoming shitstorm (be it a foreign aggression or a domestic coup). What we need is a reasonably strong government, led by the right people. (Well of course it's not foolproof - but then again, nothing is.)
The idea that a strong government, led by the right people, is a concept that actually leads to a robust system of government would make many Americans politely roll their eyes. We had a long experience with such a system. After we extricated ourselves from it, we had a long experience extricating other countries from such systems.
I hope you'll excuse me for saying so, but there is something profoundly solipsistic and unreasonable about asking me to accept your Korean experience as a basis for a claim as broad as you are making. If that is really the end and the beginning of your chain of reasoning, I urge you to reconsider your approach: we can't, unfortunately, base our understanding of political development on our experience: it's a topic with a long history and a long, long cycle time. A comparative approach, and a willingness to consider like problems and like situations in other countries, nets greater understanding in this area.
No, your ancestors had experience with such a system. They are long dead, and the struggles they faced and lessons they learned have been abstracted and bowdlerized until all we're left with is a parable against the abstract idea of a dictator.
George Washington wasn't fighting an abstract dictator. He was fighting the British Empire, an actual existing enemy with an actual ruler, with millions of people on every sides who either supported or fought against it for their own reasons. I can't even pretend to understand the issues they faced, but I do know that you cannot summarize them into a single factor.
Consider a much simpler event, like 9/11. If anyone says, "There's one reason why 9/11 happened, which is X - this is why we must never do X ever again," how much would you trust such an analysis?
That's all I'm saying. My Korean experience tells me that anyone who says it can be reduced to a single factor, or even a major factor (the size of the government), is selling snake oil. Of course, that doesn't mean I know a universal solution to avoid tyranny. If there was such a solution, mankind didn't discover it yet.
It is not reasonable to draw only on recent, lived experience when discussing political development. There is continuity of institutions from generation to generation. In the USA we have the benefit of long experience with democratic institutions, though of course this is no substitute for offering justification for our ideas. We do, however, have to look at history fairly broadly to see how these principles come into play.
To consider this all in light of your original comment and subsequent ones, you seem very confident about the application of Korean experience to American and Americans but seem to have little interest or understanding of the application of the American experience to America or Americans. It doesn't make much sense, unless the subtext is that you do not believe in the worth of applying history or the comparative method in this area at all, and rather regard Korea as a kind of model or blueprint, applicable to any nation at any time. The way you are referencing your Korean experience, as a source for statements about the most general topics, it's just a roundabout way of saying "My opinion is...".
Imperialistically rolling into some country that you want to exploit for financial gain is not something to boast about.
Yeah, but speaking of it was all they did. Singapore always had an entirely dominant state, they just figured out how to brand themselves correctly. State owned businesses became 'state-linked', regulatory frameworks are 'governmental disruption', and so on. The government owns the housing market, pretty much controls every piece of equipment that any hospital buys, and controls what newspaper can be printed. Imagine if the US nationalised the entire housing market, created an investment fund of the size of a third of the economy, and banned a dozen newspapers, I doubt we'd call it nimble administration.
There is no tradition of 'small government' in much of Asia. The centrality of public administration in the region, in China say, goes back thousands of years. Post-war Japan was basically the US if the New Deal had gone on for fourty more years, and South Korea developed for the most part under a military dictator.
In general 'big government' isn't a scary thing to most people outside of the US and England maybe. Not even in Europe does anyone actually complain about 'big government', so it's an entirely weird discussion.
This is a commonly misreported point—earlier this year I saw The Guardian claim that the reason Japan, SK and China are better at dealing with COVID is because “police visibly enforced lockdown”; two of the three never did! Sure, in Korea at times non-essential domestic travel and public events were suppressed, certain venues (e.g. dance halls) were instructed to close and some cafes had to become takeout-only, but you can still move (even if strongly recommended to stay at home) and police presence was never visibly heightened.
Contrast with mainland China, where whole apartment buildings with people in them were quite non-figuratively sealed from outside.
What I hear from Koreans is that the police is a service, like a plumber: you have a problem, you call. They can’t enter your home, can’t invade your privacy and spot-check, etc. Law enforcement is so restricted by citizens’ own choice, as they had to deal with the opposite extreme recently enough that people still remember; they hold the government responsible and treasure the freedom they have.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-sinking-of-the-...
(Speaking of, the masses protesting by government buildings to make that happen showed people that could hardly be paralysed by a concern about what she might say.)
tldr its a shitshow
(1) is a known hard problem in a democracy. The democracy in Korea is young as you have noted and there are cultural holdovers from previous times, so perhaps having (2) happen N times first is the only way forward—otherwise all they’d get is an illusion.
Where (2) is not implemented, (1) is less likely to happen (no deterrent). If (2) is implemented and citizens learn to elect better and keep trying, (1) may happen at some point.
older voters might remember. issues from 2 elections ago. conditions have changed.
maybe 2 elections ago a hot issue was too many foreign workers. maybe 2 elections later businesses are unhappy about the difficulty of employing foreign workers.
my take is. its not so much a dictatorship, especially after lee kuan yew. but its pragmatic. whatever the majority wants, it will try to give.
not so much a dictatorship. but actually populist???
The same things that make the Asian peoples compliant with societal restrictions and "big government" might also leave them vulnerable to being led astray by those same governments, or tolerant of dictatorial actions. (and not just singling out Asian cultures here -- any authority-respecting people)
The same traits that make Americans uncooperative with government mandates might be a great protection against unreasonable actions of a tyrant. Or it could be a very bad weakness in a complex, connected economy.
After reading Jared Diamond's idea about the nature of cultural traits in Guns Germs Steel (though he didn't phrase it that way exactly), I think of that often when these things come up. A country's culture, ethos, political system (quite independent from individual behavior, as individuals quickly get absorbed into national behavior) determines a lot of how they survive or resist, or adapt.
The question is whether they have the right combination of traits to get them through the slew of challenges in aggregate, over time, that life throws at them randomly, to succeed in the long run.
Will the idea of big spending government also delivers the same outcome? If yes, how do we manage those so that we will not arrive at the great depression of 1929?
It's a pretty hard case to make that a disease which disproportionately killed health 20-30 year-olds led to mass prosperity.
Given all the advancements which were happening in the early 20th century, I'm inclined to say that prosperity happened in SPITE of WWI and the Spanish Flu. Who knows where we would be, had we avoided two huge human catastrophes.
That's exactly what happened during the black plague. It lead to the end of feudalism. A shortage of labor will absolutely boost the value of labor.
Not sure that's worth the cost of course.
Where I live we get 10x the gov. budget deficit than the previous year and the government is reducing and eliminating taxes at the same time. So the "taxes" will come in the form of reduced value of money, or taxes in the future. Level of taxation is pretty much equivalent to the level of government spending. There's, no way around it.
On top of that, general population's savings are being depleted. So yeah, future is bleak. Anyway, I hope the gov spending will get to sane levels soon.
It doesn't help that this is the global phenomenon, so economy/currency is not crashing as much compared to the surrounding countries. But there are still wild swings of ~10% or so compared to USD or EUR.
Honest question, what mechanisms do you think will make this happen? Or is it more of a general hope-it-happens?
In my experience, getting anyone to spend less after they are used to spending a lot (be it a government, a company, a business unit, or even just your kids) simply doesn't happen, barring a fundamental change in circumstances whereby the alternate of continuing to spend a lot results in immediate ruin.
Time so switch to a better currency!
However in reality the deathtoll from COVID is scarcely distinguishable from regular influenza seasons. Only 0.06% of Sweden's population succumbed to COVID and their annual deaths are shaping up to be the same as prior years, for example. Similar situation in Germany.
I don't know if that is the right lesson to learn. The great depression was largely caused by a stock market crash related to lack of regulation, and a drought (hello climate change). It was largely solved by big government wartime spending.
A strong state apparatus without accountability or a principle of transcendent law -- that is a far "bigger" government than any in Asia currently. Really, people in Asia are still getting used to a smaller government.
[1] Facebook is full of nurses coming forward with this, and I know some people working at the hospital.
COVID-19 didn't cause such trouble, but I imagine a more deadly virus could, and it could be very hard to trace the source. At the same time, I doubt this would be possible to fully control for the government that spread it, so it seems improbable too.
China, Russia and every other country has been given a wonderful blueprint for absolutely disrupting the US and really entire western order. The fact nobody seems to be talking about the national security implications of this virus and what our rivals or enemies have learned is frightening.
Can you imagine how fucked things would get if another virus struck the US right after we deal with Covid?
Probably not. Notice something interesting about COVID - countries that were scared of SARS did fine, countries that weren't scared of SARS suffered.
If you chart out the response to COVID in the West it is probably something like disease growing exponentially, response growing linearly. The mobilisation of resources over the last 11 months has been staggering. If another virus appeared now it would get demolished because everyone is already on high alert. The regulatory paths for emergency tests would be exercised recently, and it seems likely that the stupid issue where the US government basically banned private testing in the first month of the response is resolved.
If it is contained early, COVID is experienced quite differently to if it is allowed to become endemic. Really, if we replayed this pandemic but people understood the risk of air travel w.r.t. disease it would go completely differently. It'll be decades before people relax again.
If the government doesn't take decisive action early, then I will chose camp defector rather than camp sucker.
And I mean good and bad governments, with good and bad ideas.
It's hard being in government, you never get to do the things you want, it's a long, compromising grind. There's no money for anything so either you raise taxes (scary), take on more debt (also scary) or print money (scary).
The conservative government in the UK and liberal government in Canada have made major green announcements, a lot of this is opportunistic politiking.
The 'Modern Monetary Theorists' ('debts don't matter' people) are definitely pushing hard at this time.
Because every central bank and government is going into full on Keynsian spending, they're likely going to want to keep on doing that, and not reverting to the 'regular economy'. Power is hard to reliquish.
In Canada, pre-covid, we saw the average house price increase in value more than the average wage in the country. That is point blank crazy. That is a weird financialisation of the economy that we don't yet understand - inflation in a fixed asset that doesn't increase productivity.
Even the US Fed said just a few days ago 'It's a New World Orders'.
People should be spooked because with all the flux and the rules being re-written there will be power grabs, and just because people think they are benevolent, doesn't mean they are. Surely, a common denominator in humanity is the propensity for people to make power grabs when they can.
This isn’t weird, it’s simple supply and demand. Nobody wants to build housing and people still need a place to live so they have to sacrifice more and more of their income to fight over the limited good space.
Construction is 11% of the Canadian economy, and it's not just a function of housing shortage.
"It's supply and demand"
Technically, but that's not the best way to describe it.
This is not 'more people fewer homes'
It's mostly due to low interest rates, and, the very strong expectation there will be increased value. This leads to explosive valuations. Add in some foreign interest, banks making loans for ever longer periods, and it gets into an ugly cycle.
It's very, very bad for the economy to get into this state because money pours into assets that don't increase productivity.
It's a 'mistake' because of how it affects property prices.
There is a war between the middle class and the working class that nobody wants to talk about because it's ultra-unpopulist.
The middle class are the most likely to vote, but the working class deserve are sympathy?
Not at the cost of my massively increasing home!
It's not so much owning real estate but real estate with the sole purpose of investing/using it as a way to park assets.
This is a result of an overly conservative investment landscape and out of control immigration quotas. Housing is used as a way to park money in a jurisdiction that has more predictable laws.
Just like when interest rates are higher in one country than the next, money flows there.
ROI is higher in housing than other sectors, money flows there.
Foreign buyers and mass immigration are driving factors, but I don't think the primary issue.
Another way of putting it, is that real productivity is way down, and the real economy is in deflation - stuff is getting cheaper, and the opportunities to create value are fewer and far between, the only places left are the stock market and housing etc..
These exist because prices have jumped up so much relative to income, so it's a side effect of speculation really.
> Another way of putting it, is that real productivity is way down, and the real economy is in deflation - stuff is getting cheaper, and the opportunities to create value are fewer and far between, the only places left are the stock market and housing etc..
That worries me.
I'd rather prefer growth to come from new IP than magic assets that can never go down.
If you mean the cover-up or data fudging accusations, I highly recommend the four part series in Quillette that examines the merit of these charges. It's very long, however.
https://quillette.com/category/covid-19/china-syndrome-serie...
Here's the Twitter thread where the author introduced the series and gave some helpful backgrounds:
https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1298053847844368386
As he says:
"Again, I know that many of you are skeptical, but this essay has required a ridiculous amount of work and I'm really confident about the conclusions I reach, so I hope you will read it with an open-mind. I will post the other parts in this thread as they are published."
What is the tldr? China didn’t do it on purpose and they were just grossly incompetent? They didn’t share data because it was all in word perfect files and they couldn’t convert it?
South Korea and Singapore didn’t ban Chinese travelers at all. And I think Japan and Vietnam only banned travelers from specific provinces.
Conspiracy theorists misconstrue independent opportunist agents as centrally planned competence.
They heavily overweigh competence.
~ Winston Churchill
you're entitled to your opinion too, eh?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25222164
"Different strokes for different folks" often grows out of differences in their personal reality that make different choices make more sense to them.
When I think of "big government", I imagine a militarized police force, lack of access to medical care, pervasive surveillance, unchecked imperialism, billionaires writing their own rules and to tie a bow on the top: a propaganda wing to manufacture the consent of the governed.
If you think what I wrote about above can only happen in "authoritarian" or, gasp, "communist" countries, you are certainly mistaken.
The militarized police force was bested by a couple hundred anarchists and no charges even filed.
The lack of access to medical care just spent $6 billion buy vaccines for everyone in the country.
The unchecked imperialism just drew down all their troops and is achieving real progress towards normalized peaceful relations.
A few of the others are quite on point though.
The police funding was increased instead of decreased as the movement demanded. The policy goals of people in the streets were absolutely thwarted and the police continue to do whatever they want.
> The lack of access to medical care just spent $6 billion buy vaccines for everyone in the country.
Congrats, you get one (1) vaccine so they can keep making money off your labor. If you have a stroke or an accident, that's on you.
> The unchecked imperialism just drew down all their troops and is achieving real progress towards normalized peaceful relations.
The US military has "lily pads" in over a hundred (and maybe over two hundred) places in the world and patrols the high seas. The oil supply is secured and various coups are funded or otherwise supported, for example in Bolivia which has just defeated the latest attempt to secure private control of the lithium fields.
Source? A couple hundred anarchists were not there to "best" Officers Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove when they shot 32 times at Breonna Taylor in her own home.[1] It is not just a few "bad apples" when the whole tree was planted to enforce and uphold slavery.[2]
> The lack of access to medical care just spent $6 billion buy vaccines for everyone in the country.
We funded the development of these vaccine candidates, yet it seems like we are going to have pay to out of pocket if we actually want to use them. If we already payed for it, under what circumstance should we not already have it guaranteed for everyone?
On another note: losing a job should not mean losing access to healthcare. Healthcare is a human right.
> The unchecked imperialism just drew down all their troops and is achieving real progress towards normalized peaceful relations.
Really? All their troops? This one really puzzles me, especially since my country currently has its hands deep in at least two South-American country's democratic processes.[3][4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Breonna_Taylor
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_patrol
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gideon_(2020)
[4] https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/the-u-s-supported-coup-i...