‘Dynamic’ Welfare State > 영어토론방

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Hundreds of politicians, academics and civic and labor activists met Monday under the cause of turning Korea into a welfare state. Foreigners, especially Westerners, might find this seemingly abrupt move long overdue. But the truth is, the world’s 14th largest economy has never been a welfare state as industrial countries see it, even less a ``dynamic” one, as the organizers of the new movement mean it.

A good indicator of where Korea stands in welfare issues is the ongoing political debate over the school-meal system. President Lee Myung-bak and his conservative supporters brush aside the opposition’s calls for free school lunch as ``socialist” and ``populist” claims. This shows their concept of welfare is based on such outdated modifiers as ``beneficent” and ``selective.” In most industrial countries, however, free lunch is just part of free education, which the governments should guarantee their peoples as ``basic” and ``universal” rights.

Little wonder that less than 15 percent of Korean students are ``benefitting” from free meals, while the comparable ratios are nearly 100 percent in Western European nations of social democracy, and well over 50 percent even in the United States and Britain, the so-called bastions of neo-liberalistic capitalism.

Even the previous two liberal administrations adhered to this ``static” notion of welfare based on the Anglo-American economic model of globalization and unlimited competition, failing to keep the income gap from widening further among the people and losing in major elections. And this means how difficult it would be to enlighten voters of what genuine welfare is supposed to be, in this country where even low-income brackets support the Lee administration’s tax cuts for wealthy property holders, believing in the ``trickle down” effect, which has long proved to be all but non-existent, both here and abroad.

Moreover, as seen in President Lee’s ``worker-friendly” policy and his conservative archrival Park Geun-hye’s ``welfare Korea” catch phrase, the center-rightist camps have preempted the welfare slogans while the left-of-center parties were reeling under the aftermath of election defeats not even knowing what exactly has gone wrong _ in terms of economic ideology and its practices.

So it was right for the advocates of the new movement to place focus not just on welfare but on broader economic policies, such as taxation, fiscal operation and corporate regulations. Without changing fundamental economic and social structure, there are clear limitations to the incumbent government’s worker-friendly policy, as shown by the failures of some initial examples. For instance, the long-term lending program for college students have already turned another source of usurious income for banks, while the micro-credit system is too far away from those who need it most because of too high a threshold for the working poor.

What matters is how to link the welfare to economic dynamism. There is too much truth to ignore in the adage, ``the provision of jobs is the best welfare policy.” This means the new movement’s success lies in whether it can create a ``dynamic welfare society,” in which production, not finance, plays a central role and welfare is closely connected to production, working to sharply improve distribution and continue to create productive demand from within the system.

And the forthcoming local elections will be a good starting place to present at least some concrete alternatives to turn the new manifesto into reality.

Excerpt from The Korea Times
 
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