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Does the Dear Leader Understand Incentives?

In last week's issue of The Economist(Apr 29-May 5) there is an obituary for a South Korean film director, Shin Sang-Ok, who was once kidnapped by Kim Jong Il and forced to make propaganda films for the totalitarian North Korean government. Especially amusing was the following:

Mr. Kim was worried that films produced in decadent, capitalist South Korea were better than those produced in the North. Perceptively, he explained to Mr. Shin that this was because North Korean film workers knew the state would feed them regardless of the quality of their output. In the South, by contrast, actors and directors had to sweat to make films the public would pay to see.

It would be hard to believe that Mr. Kim could not extend the analogy to other aspects of his command-and-control economy. It is not always a lack of knowledge of the problems of socialism that cause tyranny to continue. Those who run the beast sometimes know the evils they delivering, but choose to continue them anyways, as long as they themselves are not harmed by the system.

-- Kevin D. Rollins

Posted by Kevin D. Rollins on May 12, 2006 10:20 PM |

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