By Bryan Cheron
Reading the news and watching video footage of the demonstrations in Seoul, Wall Street, and other places all over the world, it is clear that demonstrators are misguided.
From what I have observed, three of the chief demands of the Occupy Seoul movement are for Korean lawmakers to: 1) not ratify the FTA with the United States, 2) pass legislation making it illegal for employers to treat non-regular employees differently from regular workers, and 3) impose greater financial regulations.
What all these proposed solutions have in common, aside the immoral premise that the government should and has the right to interfere in the economic affairs of citizens, is that they would make the problems they try to solve worse.
Opponents of free trade claim that it benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else. On the contrary, the problem with the current free trade agreement is that it does too little too slowly.
If people were free to buy and sell goods with America and the world, it would reduce poverty; there would be no tariffs, allowing more consumers to buy more foreign goods at lower prices. Goods produced by Korean firms would be cheaper as well because of the increased competition, and this competition would also yield more innovation, which is another benefit.
Finally, if foreign companies had fewer barriers to enter into the Korean marketplace, they would invest more and hire more employees, thus reducing unemployment.
The proposal to require firms to treat non-regular workers the same as regular employees is something that would have a terrible unintended consequence: higher unemployment, particularly among young workers. Non-regular workers are more likely to be new to the labor market than regular employees, and because they have yet to acquire the experience and skills that older workers have, their labor is not yet as valuable to employers.
Requiring employers to treat them as equal to regular workers would result in higher compensation for those who are employed, but fewer opportunities for employment, since firms will hire fewer people. As economist Milton Friedman said, ``One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results." The results of this proposal would be greater poverty.
The final Occupy Seoul demand I will address is one that is shared by most, if not all, other Occupy street/city movements: greater government regulation of the financial sector, in part to crack down on corruption. Here again, the solution is less government intervention, not more. As philosopher Ayn Rand said in response to a complaint about corruption, ``I said that such problems would always exist so long as government controls existed, and that the only solution was a system of full, laissez-faire capitalism, under which no groups could acquire economic privileges or special pull, so that everyone would have to stand on his own."
The Occupy Seoul protesters want the government to stop corruption, but so long as the government has the power to grant special favors, they will grant them to their friends and former employers and coworkers in the private sector. The only way to truly change this is to strip government of the power to forcefully regulate private economic arrangements.
Years ago I would have found myself agreeing with the Occupy Seoul demonstrators, but I have come to see the error in calling for more government regulations as the solution, as well as the prevailing orthodoxy that the product of one person's productive labor is another's entitlement.
Will the protestors one day look back at their demands and say the same? One can hope!
The author is a lecturer at a Seoul university. He can be reached at bcheron@cogeco.ca.