The Road to a Welfare Paradise Is the Road to Serfdom

The Democratic Party of Korea has decided to include a “Basic Society” in its party platform. The party’s Central Committee approved revisions to the platform and party constitution incorporating the Basic Society, and the final adoption is to take place at the National Party Members’ Convention on the 18th. A sentence was added to the full text of the platform stating: “(The Democratic Party) seeks a Basic Society that overcomes socioeconomic polarization and inequality and guarantees a basic standard of life for all people.” The Basic Society, which has become something of former leader Lee Jae-myung’s trademark, centers on the state guaranteeing the fundamentals of life, including income, housing, finance, and healthcare.

Even apart from the Basic Society, there have long been arguments that welfare policies such as income support, housing welfare, and medical benefits are already being implemented in part or ought to be. There was also the so-called controversy over the “three free and one half-price” policies: free healthcare, free education, free childcare, and half-price college tuition. The Basic Society, however, differs in kind from these existing fragmented and individual policies and proposals. It not only expands the scope beyond education to income, housing, healthcare, and finance, and deepens intervention accordingly, but also officially states in a political party’s platform that it seeks a society in which the state guarantees the basic lives of all people.

A place where the state takes responsibility for the people’s “basic lives,” a place that aspires to such a society, already exists. For example, free healthcare is often discussed as if it were an ideal our society should pursue, but there is already a place that has implemented completely free healthcare. Consider the following statement: “There is no country in the world like ours, where the state takes responsibility for and cares for the health of everyone—from children to mothers with babies to the elderly—and treats them free of charge without taking a single penny.” These are remarks by Kim Jong-il published in Rodong Sinmun in January 2015. As this statement suggests, North Korea operates a system of “complete free healthcare.” And we are well aware of the reality behind this complete free healthcare that North Korea boasts of. Should such a system in North Korea really be the future we aspire to?

One may argue that the Basic Society is different from North Korea’s free system. One may insist that the Basic Society, as the term suggests, guarantees only a “basic life,” while leaving the rest to individual autonomy, personal ability, and the role of the market. But once such a policy actually begins to be pursued, the historical experience of welfare-state expansion—what we have already gone through and are still going through—clearly foreshadows the direction it will take. Consider the path by which free school meals were expanded. At first, they were provided to low-income children at risk of hunger, but the target group gradually widened, and now they are provided to all students. They first expanded to elementary schools, then middle schools, and eventually high schools. Also consider the reality that, at every election, politicians compete through basic pensions by promising to give more. It began at 200,000 won, was quickly increased, and now stands at more than 300,000 won. It may begin with a “basic life,” but we already know the path of how far it can be expanded and deepened. The train of welfare populism has no brakes.

What must never be overlooked in connection with promises of a welfare paradise is that utopian worlds, which claim to represent an ideal society, without exception display the features of totalitarian societies. A representative example is Thomas More’s Utopia, where houses are all the same, clothes are all the same, meals must be taken at fixed times all together, and occupations are assigned according to social necessity rather than individual choice. The uniformity and totalitarianism visible in North Korea, where the state claims responsibility for the people’s lives, do not appear by accident. They are the inevitable condition of a society that believes in and follows promises of a welfare paradise. Friedrich Hayek, the great liberal scholar, called that path “the road to serfdom.”

Hyukchul Kwon, Director of the Free Market Institute

Original title: 복지 천국으로 가는 길은 노예로의 길이다

Author: Hyeok-cheol Kwon

Date: 2024-08-14

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=2&idx=26794