A nearly perfect totalitarian system. President Trump said on Thursday that he would like to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. From Nicholas Eberstadt, here are some things to understand about the regime:
The North Korean political system is one of a kind. Originally spawned by Stalin as a far-flung Soviet satellite at the beginning of the Cold War, North Korea broke free from Moscow early on, and has mutated into an Asiatic hereditary dynasty in its own right. It retains all the instruments of control and terror from the original Marxist-Leninist model, while supplementing them with a whole roster of inventive new totalitarian tricks of its own.
Evidently, the North Korean variant of totalitarianism is superior to the Soviet prototype. The latter, after all, is in the dustbin of history, and the former is very much still with us.
Where Marxist-Leninist states always have a secret police force, the North Korean state set up multiple services. Not only does they spy on and suppress the subject population, these services also surveille each other and report any signs of disloyalty or impurity to the very top. Marxist-Leninist states always had their dreaded gulags, but North Korea's political prisons, or kwan-li-so, are even more terrifying. Adapted to capitalize on Asian family values, they threaten the horror of the concentration camp not only for the arrestee, but also for his whole extended family – children, cousins, grandparents, everyone. When you wonder why North Koreans don't rise up against the horrible oppression they suffer, or why more people don't try to flee its inhumanity, remember this part: The system is carefully designed to hold every North Korean's entire bloodline hostage.
And then there is North Korea's unique, and uniquely odious, Songbun system. Marx may have envisioned his Communism as a classless utopia, but Pyongyang pulled full throttle in the opposite direction, imposing carefully calibrated class designations as a tool for social control. In North Korea, class status (currently, there are over 50 of them) is assigned for life, and one's Songbun determines one's chances in life – and death. It is a safe bet that no one from North Korea's privileged "core" classes died in the Great North Korean Famine of the 1990s, and that almost all the victims were members of the so-called "hostile" classes. Songbun formalizes and perfects techniques of social atomization that Stalin and Mao only pioneered, transforming divide-and-rule into a science, and thus routinizing internal mutual mistrust and hatred to a degree perhaps never attained through deliberate government policy.
[Nicholas Eberstadt, "One Kim to Rule Them All: Everything You Need to Know about the North Korean Threat," American Consequences, February 2018]
Loans for pensions are actually bailouts. Congress is considering a bill that would authorize the federal government to loan money to underfunded private sector pension plans. It's really a bailout bill. Rachel Greszler explains:
Unlike loans made in the private sector, which happen only where a legitimate expectation of repayment (and a risk-compensating interest rate) can be established, loans to insolvent pension plans would have a high expectation of default.
The Butch Lewis Act—a proposal to bail out private-sector pensions through loans as well as direct cash assistance—acknowledges the high probability of default by stipulating that pension plans that have trouble repaying their loans after 30 years of interest-only payments will be eligible for forgiveness or alternative repayment plans.
A loan with a zero-consequence default option for the borrower is not a loan—it's a bailout.
But it's not just defaults that taxpayers need to be concerned about. There's also the cost of providing highly subsidized, low- or no-interest loans for 15 to 30 years, as well as the risk that plans will increase—rather than decrease—their unfunded liabilities over the course of their loans.
These features could lead to loans to insolvent pension plans costing taxpayers more than direct cash bailouts.
But those costs won't be apparent in the official government score because the Congressional Budget Office is required to score loans under the assumption that insolvent pension plans are essentially riskless borrowers.
[Rachel Greszler, "Senate 'Loan' Bill Is a Poorly Disguised Bailout for Private Pensions," The Daily Signal, March 9]
The welfare state holds women back. Women in the United States are more likely to make it to the top in their fields than are women in the Nordic countries, despite the latter's reputation for gender equality. Nima Sanandaji writes:
The Nordic countries are in many ways the most gender-equal in the world, owing to their history, culture, and some beneficial policies. Therefore, foreign observers assume replicating Nordic policies is the key to women's progress, even when facts and research tell us the opposite.
Welfare policies, high taxes that make it costly to purchase substitutable services, generous benefit systems that reduce economic incentives for full-time work, public-sector monopolies/oligopolies in female-dominated sectors, and paid-leave policies that incentivize long breaks from working life prevent women from reaching the top. Taken together, these policies create a Nordic glass ceiling. Gender quotas are unable to make up the difference, even though politicians routinely point to gender quotas as a policy success story. In reality they fall short of their objectives.
It is true that Nordic countries have high female employment rates and an unusually gender-equal history and gender-equal values, and these achievements merit admiration. Still, the proportion of women managers, executives, and business owners is disappointingly low. Several other countries that lack the advantages of the Nordics, but have more small-government and market-oriented policies, have a larger proportion of women who reach the top. This is true of the United States.
[Nima Sanandaji, "The Nordic Glass Ceiling," Cato Institute, March 8]
Recasting the steel debate: Trade restrictions are not a way of helping Americans compete with foreigners; they are a way of helping some Americans gain at the expense of other Americans. Veronique de Rugy writes:
When a government imposes an import tax on foreign steel, for example, the main effect is an increase of the price of steel. The result is higher costs for all steel-consuming industries, as well as their customers. There are 140,000 workers in the steel-producing industry and at least 5.4 million workers, and perhaps as many as 12 million, in steel-consuming industries.
The consequence of higher steel prices is thousands of jobs lost in these latter industries in the name of protecting a few workers in the former—and, of course, higher prices and shoddier quality products for millions of consumers.
This is exactly what happened in 2002 when the Bush administration imposed some steel tariffs on a few countries' imports. Those taxes protected the steel industry from a few, specific competitors and allowed them to jack up the price of domestic steel, without a positive impact on steel employment.
Those in steel-consuming industries, however, weren't so lucky. By one estimate, 200,000 people lost their jobs in downstream industries in following years. That's more workers than in the entire steel industry.
According to a 2003 U.S. International Trade Commission report, other consequences of these 2002 tariffs were difficulties obtaining steel in the quality and quantity desired, a shift to using parts finished overseas, and the relocation of U.S steel-consuming facilities to other countries. These results sound like the opposite of what Mr. Trump wants to achieve.
Finally, when foreign governments subsidize their industries, U.S. consumers reap the benefits: they pay less for imports. The bottom line is that crony shenanigans abroad shouldn't be answered with crony shenanigans here, especially given that these will mostly hurt our economy. It is counterproductive.
[Veronique de Rugy, "4 Bad Arguments for Trump's New Tariffs," Reason, March 6]
Don't forget to turn in your life plans! Some New Mexico legislators want to force students to apply for college (or prove that they have made other plans for their life after graduation). Maybe, writes George Leef, legislators don't know what's best for every student:
But so what if college enrollments have been declining? Most of our political and educational leaders assume that the more years of formal education an individual has, the better off they will be, earning more money (and coincidentally paying more taxes), enjoying better health, having a more stable life, and so forth. They conclude that declining college enrollment must mean that more young people are making a serious mistake in not going to college—a mistake that the government should help to prevent with a law like House Bill 23. If the state compels students to either apply to college or have approved alternative plans, then fewer would make the "mistake" of not going to college—or so the bill's supporters think.
But those state politicians obviously aren't considering the possibility that too many students were going to college in the past and that the decline reflects better knowledge about the balance of costs and benefits of college seeping into the minds of New Mexicans. The idea that was current up until about a decade ago—that college is a great investment for nearly everyone—has been fading in the face of reality. Many young Americans and their families know that college can turn out to be a costly bust and they don't want to make that mistake.
Writing on Forbes, Preston Cooper points out that about a third of recent college graduates are underemployed. Choosing not to go to college makes perfect sense if you want to avoid spending years of time and lots of money in college only to end up working in a job you could do without this "investment." He points to data compiled by the New York Federal Reserve Bank showing that just having a college degree does not get you a good job.
[George Leef, "Forcing Students to Apply to College Is a Bad Idea," The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, March 9]
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