Not a Given: The Roots of Convenience and Inconvenience

Even in my room, where I spend so much of my time, there are days when something suddenly looks a little unfamiliar. “Ah, so that book was shelved there!” “Was the picture hanging over my bed always this nice?” I think everyone has had similar experiences. Even in spaces where we live every day, the objects we consciously notice are, psychologically speaking, more limited than we tend to think. But one day, for one reason or another, when we begin to look at that space with “new eyes,” the things we had easily passed over finally start to register more fully in our minds.

People take far too many things around them for granted and do not think deeply about them. This is especially true when it comes to economic issues. We do not try to understand what exactly lies behind the conveniences and inconveniences we experience every day. Of course, at first people may have paid no attention for one reason or another—because they felt it was not something they could control in the first place, or because they thought it was too complicated. But that indifference soon hardens into an unconscious habit. Yet identifying the source of the conveniences we enjoy and the cause of the inconveniences we suffer is an important task, one that helps us answer what we should embrace and what we should avoid in dealing with social problems. We desperately need “new eyes” that make us look again at the world around us.

Take the mobile phone you may be holding in your hand right now. Even that phone—the one that lets you make face-to-face calls in real time with someone on the other side of the globe, and search for whatever you do not know anytime, anywhere in the sea of information called the internet—is not something to be taken for granted. The clothes you wear to express your individuality are no different, nor is the king salmon sushi you ate to your heart’s content the other day. You might ask, “Why not? I worked hard to earn the money to buy, wear, and eat those things.” True. But until just over fifty years ago, no matter how hard people worked—even if they were born into the highest elite—they could not so much as glimpse the things you now enjoy as a matter of course. Even John Rockefeller, whose wealth relative to the size of the economy was perhaps several times that of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, could not indulge in the luxury of holding a light device in his hand and speaking face-to-face with a friend across the globe.

So what is it that enables us to enjoy things even unparalleled tycoons could not? No matter how much you may dislike capitalism, the only answer we can give is the market economy. Only a market economy—one that guarantees private property rights and freedom of contract, allowing individuals to pursue their own interests—can achieve this kind of prosperity. Some say all of this is thanks to “technological progress.” That is not wrong, but it is an incomplete answer. No matter how much “knowledge” of new technologies exists in academic papers or in people’s minds, if that knowledge is not commercialized and brought to market in a free market on the basis of saving, technology alone cannot produce material progress. Freedom is a necessary condition for prosperity.

Many people think of the collapse of status hierarchies and assume that, since most modern states in principle guarantee private property rights and freedom of contract, we have already secured this necessary condition sufficiently. But the “freedom” being discussed here is not confined to a merely formal or principled level. State power has constantly endangered and infringed on property rights and freedom of contract. One need only look at today’s Korean economy, where various labor market regulations prevent employers and workers from freely entering into contracts, and entry barriers erected in transportation and other industries block innovation. More than that, Korea is drifting away from the market economy. For example, in 1969, the 59 member companies of the Electronics Industry Association issued a statement opposing Samsung’s entry into the electronics industry. Their argument was essentially this: what are we supposed to do if a “chaebol” like Samsung pushes into an already saturated electronics market? This kind of logic, which is still common today, enjoyed substantial public support even back then. What if, at that time, the government had refused to approve Samsung Electronics under the guise of “shared growth” or “protection”? The seeds of prosperity are always precarious, always hanging at the edge of a cliff.

Likewise, it is not natural or inevitable that these days you find it unusually hard to get a job or even a part-time position, or that last week you got into an absurd argument with a taxi driver in a cab reeking of cigarette smoke. Nor is it natural that tape suddenly disappeared one day from the packing table at the supermarket, forcing you to carry your own tape around; or that you drove to the supermarket to shop only to find it closed for a mandatory holiday and had to turn back home; or that, even though you plan to sit in a café for only five minutes before leaving, your drink has to be poured into a cheap plastic container and then transferred back into a disposable cup. These inconveniences scattered throughout our lives are things we did not have to endure, and indeed they are things that could be replaced by the convenience of the market. They are all the result of unnecessary government regulation and intervention in the market.

From the moment it took office, the Moon Jae-in administration drove the Korean economy into panic with radical anti-market policies. Even as economic indicators plunged day after day with no apparent bottom, it responded only with falsehoods, excuses, and blame-shifting, and continued its policy course without the slightest reflection. There is a reason it has become so hard even to find a part-time job that pays the minimum wage, and why more and more storefronts on every street are posted for lease. These were hardships that could have been avoided if the Moon Jae-in administration had pursued market-friendly policies. The discomfort we experience in taxis is no different. If there were no Passenger Transport Service Act granting government-licensed taxis a monopoly over passenger transport services, we would not have to encounter drivers who smoke in their cabs or pick pointless fights with passengers. Mobility services that offer comfortable rides, pleasant environments, and thoughtful touches such as phone-charging service would come to dominate the market instead. It may seem unfair, but in a democracy, the ultimate responsibility for all these absurdities falls on the citizens. Unless we look again at the inconveniences around us with “new eyes,” identify their causes, and actively raise the issue, they cannot be resolved.

Understanding the value of freedom requires conscious effort, but it is certainly not difficult. It does not mean being altruistic and looking after others, nor does it mean following some moral code. It simply means taking another look, with “new eyes,” at the benefits of prosperity you enjoy as a matter of course and the inconveniences you often encounter. If you look around and think carefully in that way, before long you will find yourself appreciating the preciousness of freedom.

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Original title: 당연하지 않다: 편리함과 불편함의 근원

Author: Beom-su Jo

Date: 2020-03-11

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=15&idx=22469