As a South Korean, I'm not sure covid has much to do with acceptance of "big government." Unlike most of the West, many Asians have lived under real dictators - some still do. We know what a dictatorship looks like, and we know how terrible your life can be when the government abandons its duty to protect people.
To put it other way, "Your government shouldn't have enough power to fight an epidemic, because that's too much power" has never been an actual argument in Korea, and (I believe) most of Asia as well. We don't want a small, underpowered government. We want a properly supervised government that uses its power to protect people.
> "Your government shouldn't have enough power to fight an epidemic, because that's too much power"
What’s enough power? A government-mandated lockdown is legally impossible in Japan but they have managed to keep COVID cases within a number that can be handled by their medical system.
I feel that if you're an island like Japan, Singapore, or New Zealand, or effectively isolated like Korea (3 sea borders + 1 land border which is permanently closed, and land-mined) then maybe the amount of power your government has isn't the key factor in keeping your country safe from a pandemic.
The procedures used in NYC aren't drastically different from Singapores', but the key difference is that Manhattan cannot close its borders to the rest of the 50 US States.
When people ask for a strong government in the US, its' within that context. They want a government that could enforce quarantines between different states, locking people into one state or another till the virus burns itself out. That's the way it worked in China, but is legally impossible to do in the US.
The US can have minor quarantines (an apartment, a city block, etc.) but we can't legally quarantine a whole city, much less states.
I agree 100%. As an Asian American it is baffling how throughout years of propaganda, so many Americans firmly believe that personal freedom and democracy cannot co-exist with a competent and effective government that has all the tools and resources to do its job.
I think it comes from shallow interpretation of sayings such as "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". I mean it's a catchy saying, but in reality it's just a result of terrible system engineering (in this case the government system) in many places.
It is totally possible to have a powerful government and have that government supervise. In the end there is a clear distinction between "big government" and "authoritarian dictatorship". If your big government devolves into individual dictatorship it just mean the single executive position likely had too much power to begin with.
In fact, similar to companies, it's very well possible to avoid a single dictator CEO even as your company grows large and end up with a large management hierarchy.
> If your big government devolves into individual dictatorship it just mean the single executive position likely had too much power to begin with.
And it is.
There were nobody to put brakes on Obama's "point, and click" signature strikes, and him signing on, for all intents, and reasons, an extrajudicial assasination orders of US citizens.
> I agree 100%. As an Asian American it is baffling how throughout years of propaganda, so many Americans firmly believe that personal freedom and democracy cannot co-exist with a competent and effective government that has all the tools and resources to do its job.
Propaganda? What?
> I think it comes from shallow interpretation of sayings such as "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". I mean it's a catchy saying, but in reality it's just a result of terrible system engineering (in this case the government system) in many places.
I'm pretty sure it comes from the enlightenment era and especially the American Revolutionary War. American colonists were never been big fans of the powerful churches and monarchs of Europe they were trying to escape.
> If your big government devolves into individual dictatorship it just mean the single executive position likely had too much power to begin with.
Would you believe me if I told you this very thing was happening across the world in the 1930s and 1940s? And pretty close to home too? Maybe all it takes is enough people to forget history.
Altough marketed differently, America was founded by wealthy landowners who wanted to pay fewer taxes to uphold some empire.
If you look at who's funding today's misinformation outfits, you'll find characters from a similar background: libertarian corporatists who implicitly believe a dollar is one vote.
It's not hard to see the continuity and how the marketing works: worship of the entrepreneur, hard work, superstarism. Leading naturally into calls for small government, temporarily embarrassed millionaire syndrome, defining fairness along lines of economic success, etc.
It's a shame we're so unaware of the marketing. It's actually not very difficult to poke through. I think the fact that so many early settlers came for religious reasons (their home states in Europe didn't look kindly on their fundamentalism and fanaticism) set the tone in terms of a people that so easily believes in stories.
I think you are inferring too much from too short a period of history. Rhee's semi-monarchial military government ended only in 1960.
East Asians have long operated a comparatively strong state apparatus, a system borrowed from the Qin that goes back about 2200 years, which many scholars will argue is the first truly bureaucratic state. This is one of the central components of a developed country, and certainly of big government, but is no protection against dictators. It certainly never was for China or Japan (or Korea under Japanese rule).
Even the recent history of Korea puts your point about what happens when "...the government abandons its duty to protect people." in doubt, because Rhee was the government. What has tended to balance out the power of the state historically is (a) a sense of law as something independent of the government and binding on it and (b) mechanisms of accountability, like elections, that require large portions of the state apparatus to consider what they are doing in light of public approval.
I think we might be talking past each other, so let me elaborate a bit:
That Rhee's dictatorship ended only in 1960 is precisely my point - he was soon followed by Park Chung-Hee (killed by his own aide on 1979), who was followed by Chun Doo-Hwan (stepped down on 1988). In other words, the memory of dictatorship is still fresh in many South Koreans alive now - unlike America's revolutionary war, this is too recent (and, not too mention, too inglorious) to be painted over by some kind of PG-13 foundational myth.
So the suggestion that the size of the government has something to do with dictatorship would make many Koreans politely roll their eyes. Right or wrong, our world view is shaped by our experience - and my Korean experience says having a weak government has nothing to do with avoiding tyranny, and in fact is a pretty good predictor for an incoming shitstorm (be it a foreign aggression or a domestic coup). What we need is a reasonably strong government, led by the right people. (Well of course it's not foolproof - but then again, nothing is.)
Throughout worldwide modern history we have seen that authoritarian governments are by far the greatest risk to human life. It's just too dangerous to allow governments a large amount of control over people's daily lives. I'd rather take my chances with the virus.
>For decades, leaders like Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad spoke proudly of Asia's tradition of small, nimble public administration.
Yeah, but speaking of it was all they did. Singapore always had an entirely dominant state, they just figured out how to brand themselves correctly. State owned businesses became 'state-linked', regulatory frameworks are 'governmental disruption', and so on. The government owns the housing market, pretty much controls every piece of equipment that any hospital buys, and controls what newspaper can be printed. Imagine if the US nationalised the entire housing market, created an investment fund of the size of a third of the economy, and banned a dozen newspapers, I doubt we'd call it nimble administration.
There is no tradition of 'small government' in much of Asia. The centrality of public administration in the region, in China say, goes back thousands of years. Post-war Japan was basically the US if the New Deal had gone on for fourty more years, and South Korea developed for the most part under a military dictator.
In general 'big government' isn't a scary thing to most people outside of the US and England maybe. Not even in Europe does anyone actually complain about 'big government', so it's an entirely weird discussion.
Singapore sounds like a well-branded dictatorship from what I keep hearing, but Japan and South Korea have limited governments that aren’t even allowed to enforce a full lockdown.
This is a commonly misreported point—earlier this year I saw The Guardian claim that the reason Japan, SK and China are better at dealing with COVID is because “police visibly enforced lockdown”; two of the three never did! Sure, in Korea at times non-essential domestic travel and public events were suppressed, certain venues (e.g. dance halls) were instructed to close and some cafes had to become takeout-only, but you can still move (even if strongly recommended to stay at home) and police presence was never visibly heightened.
Contrast with mainland China, where whole apartment buildings with people in them were quite non-figuratively sealed from outside.
What I hear from Koreans is that the police is a service, like a plumber: you have a problem, you call. They can’t enter your home, can’t invade your privacy and spot-check, etc. Law enforcement is so restricted by citizens’ own choice, as they had to deal with the opposite extreme recently enough that people still remember; they hold the government responsible and treasure the freedom they have.
Just 6 years ago South Korea let 300 schoolchildren drown because they were paralyzed by fear of what their current dictator, lady president, might say if anyone showed a shred of initiative and independent decision making skills. Instead establishing a video link for high ranking government officials was more important than actual rescue mission.
just saying. about singapore. a majority actually like what the ruling party is doing on the whole. the ruling party changes its tune to feedback. often times its just slow.
older voters might remember. issues from 2 elections ago. conditions have changed.
maybe 2 elections ago a hot issue was too many foreign workers. maybe 2 elections later businesses are unhappy about the difficulty of employing foreign workers.
my take is. its not so much a dictatorship, especially after lee kuan yew. but its pragmatic. whatever the majority wants, it will try to give.
not so much a dictatorship. but actually populist???
I think it's hard to say -- something that we'll have to observe. Or maybe history has given us enough analogies, even for this different age?
The same things that make the Asian peoples compliant with societal restrictions and "big government" might also leave them vulnerable to being led astray by those same governments, or tolerant of dictatorial actions. (and not just singling out Asian cultures here -- any authority-respecting people)
The same traits that make Americans uncooperative with government mandates might be a great protection against unreasonable actions of a tyrant. Or it could be a very bad weakness in a complex, connected economy.
After reading Jared Diamond's idea about the nature of cultural traits in Guns Germs Steel (though he didn't phrase it that way exactly), I think of that often when these things come up. A country's culture, ethos, political system (quite independent from individual behavior, as individuals quickly get absorbed into national behavior) determines a lot of how they survive or resist, or adapt.
The question is whether they have the right combination of traits to get them through the slew of challenges in aggregate, over time, that life throws at them randomly, to succeed in the long run.
The 1918 flu pandemic along with the end of World War I, introduced the roaring 20s, a period of economic prosperity, a new cultural idea and in some sense decadence.
Will the idea of big spending government also delivers the same outcome? If yes, how do we manage those so that we will not arrive at the great depression of 1929?
What will happen is that people will just get poorer in general, than they would be without all this COVID mess.
Where I live we get 10x the gov. budget deficit than the previous year and the government is reducing and eliminating taxes at the same time. So the "taxes" will come in the form of reduced value of money, or taxes in the future. Level of taxation is pretty much equivalent to the level of government spending. There's, no way around it.
On top of that, general population's savings are being depleted. So yeah, future is bleak. Anyway, I hope the gov spending will get to sane levels soon.
It doesn't help that this is the global phenomenon, so economy/currency is not crashing as much compared to the surrounding countries. But there are still wild swings of ~10% or so compared to USD or EUR.
Anyway, I hope the gov spending will get to sane levels soon.
Honest question, what mechanisms do you think will make this happen? Or is it more of a general hope-it-happens?
In my experience, getting anyone to spend less after they are used to spending a lot (be it a government, a company, a business unit, or even just your kids) simply doesn't happen, barring a fundamental change in circumstances whereby the alternate of continuing to spend a lot results in immediate ruin.
Or, the automobile, the industrial revolution, and a booming population through agriculture and medical improvements led to economic prosperity, despite a deadly plague.
It's a pretty hard case to make that a disease which disproportionately killed health 20-30 year-olds led to mass prosperity.
Given all the advancements which were happening in the early 20th century, I'm inclined to say that prosperity happened in SPITE of WWI and the Spanish Flu. Who knows where we would be, had we avoided two huge human catastrophes.
> Will the idea of big spending government also delivers the same outcome?
I don't know if that is the right lesson to learn. The great depression was largely caused by a stock market crash related to lack of regulation, and a drought (hello climate change). It was largely solved by big government wartime spending.
This might have been the case if the original Imperial College reports of several million deaths in the US and UK were accurate, highly concentrated among the aged which would have lead to large savings on healthcare and pension costs, as well as freeing up of large amounts of real estate for younger generations.
However in reality the deathtoll from COVID is scarcely distinguishable from regular influenza seasons. Only 0.06% of Sweden's population succumbed to COVID and their annual deaths are shaping up to be the same as prior years, for example. Similar situation in Germany.
It's sad to see such a history blind piece. Asian people have long accepted a strong state apparatus. The idea that this is something new for Asian people is pure propaganda. The current governments of Japan, Korea, China, &c were preceded by governments ultimately rooted in the Qin bureaucracy of 2200 years ago, which many scholars will argue is the first bureaucratic, impersonal state.
A strong state apparatus without accountability or a principle of transcendent law -- that is a far "bigger" government than any in Asia currently. Really, people in Asia are still getting used to a smaller government.
Our Government (in Eastern Europe) has used the virus (COVID-19) to get loads amount of money from the EU and its citizens. Set price controls to push out private businesses, made health care workers lie[1] about cause of death because those hospitals have received financial aid from the EU (if the patients died from COVID-19), and so forth. You know the deal. The Government is benefiting a lot from this.
[1] Facebook is full of nurses coming forward with this, and I know some people working at the hospital.
Readit News
To put it other way, "Your government shouldn't have enough power to fight an epidemic, because that's too much power" has never been an actual argument in Korea, and (I believe) most of Asia as well. We don't want a small, underpowered government. We want a properly supervised government that uses its power to protect people.
What’s enough power? A government-mandated lockdown is legally impossible in Japan but they have managed to keep COVID cases within a number that can be handled by their medical system.
The procedures used in NYC aren't drastically different from Singapores', but the key difference is that Manhattan cannot close its borders to the rest of the 50 US States.
When people ask for a strong government in the US, its' within that context. They want a government that could enforce quarantines between different states, locking people into one state or another till the virus burns itself out. That's the way it worked in China, but is legally impossible to do in the US.
The US can have minor quarantines (an apartment, a city block, etc.) but we can't legally quarantine a whole city, much less states.
I think it comes from shallow interpretation of sayings such as "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". I mean it's a catchy saying, but in reality it's just a result of terrible system engineering (in this case the government system) in many places.
It is totally possible to have a powerful government and have that government supervise. In the end there is a clear distinction between "big government" and "authoritarian dictatorship". If your big government devolves into individual dictatorship it just mean the single executive position likely had too much power to begin with.
In fact, similar to companies, it's very well possible to avoid a single dictator CEO even as your company grows large and end up with a large management hierarchy.
Are you sure that holds for periods > 100 years?
And it is.
There were nobody to put brakes on Obama's "point, and click" signature strikes, and him signing on, for all intents, and reasons, an extrajudicial assasination orders of US citizens.
Propaganda? What?
> I think it comes from shallow interpretation of sayings such as "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". I mean it's a catchy saying, but in reality it's just a result of terrible system engineering (in this case the government system) in many places.
I'm pretty sure it comes from the enlightenment era and especially the American Revolutionary War. American colonists were never been big fans of the powerful churches and monarchs of Europe they were trying to escape.
> If your big government devolves into individual dictatorship it just mean the single executive position likely had too much power to begin with.
Would you believe me if I told you this very thing was happening across the world in the 1930s and 1940s? And pretty close to home too? Maybe all it takes is enough people to forget history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_dictatorship
If you look at who's funding today's misinformation outfits, you'll find characters from a similar background: libertarian corporatists who implicitly believe a dollar is one vote.
It's not hard to see the continuity and how the marketing works: worship of the entrepreneur, hard work, superstarism. Leading naturally into calls for small government, temporarily embarrassed millionaire syndrome, defining fairness along lines of economic success, etc.
It's a shame we're so unaware of the marketing. It's actually not very difficult to poke through. I think the fact that so many early settlers came for religious reasons (their home states in Europe didn't look kindly on their fundamentalism and fanaticism) set the tone in terms of a people that so easily believes in stories.
East Asians have long operated a comparatively strong state apparatus, a system borrowed from the Qin that goes back about 2200 years, which many scholars will argue is the first truly bureaucratic state. This is one of the central components of a developed country, and certainly of big government, but is no protection against dictators. It certainly never was for China or Japan (or Korea under Japanese rule).
Even the recent history of Korea puts your point about what happens when "...the government abandons its duty to protect people." in doubt, because Rhee was the government. What has tended to balance out the power of the state historically is (a) a sense of law as something independent of the government and binding on it and (b) mechanisms of accountability, like elections, that require large portions of the state apparatus to consider what they are doing in light of public approval.
That Rhee's dictatorship ended only in 1960 is precisely my point - he was soon followed by Park Chung-Hee (killed by his own aide on 1979), who was followed by Chun Doo-Hwan (stepped down on 1988). In other words, the memory of dictatorship is still fresh in many South Koreans alive now - unlike America's revolutionary war, this is too recent (and, not too mention, too inglorious) to be painted over by some kind of PG-13 foundational myth.
So the suggestion that the size of the government has something to do with dictatorship would make many Koreans politely roll their eyes. Right or wrong, our world view is shaped by our experience - and my Korean experience says having a weak government has nothing to do with avoiding tyranny, and in fact is a pretty good predictor for an incoming shitstorm (be it a foreign aggression or a domestic coup). What we need is a reasonably strong government, led by the right people. (Well of course it's not foolproof - but then again, nothing is.)
Dead Comment
For anyone who wants a summary the Confucius episode of Genius of the Ancient World on Netflix has a good overview.
Yeah, but speaking of it was all they did. Singapore always had an entirely dominant state, they just figured out how to brand themselves correctly. State owned businesses became 'state-linked', regulatory frameworks are 'governmental disruption', and so on. The government owns the housing market, pretty much controls every piece of equipment that any hospital buys, and controls what newspaper can be printed. Imagine if the US nationalised the entire housing market, created an investment fund of the size of a third of the economy, and banned a dozen newspapers, I doubt we'd call it nimble administration.
There is no tradition of 'small government' in much of Asia. The centrality of public administration in the region, in China say, goes back thousands of years. Post-war Japan was basically the US if the New Deal had gone on for fourty more years, and South Korea developed for the most part under a military dictator.
In general 'big government' isn't a scary thing to most people outside of the US and England maybe. Not even in Europe does anyone actually complain about 'big government', so it's an entirely weird discussion.
This is a commonly misreported point—earlier this year I saw The Guardian claim that the reason Japan, SK and China are better at dealing with COVID is because “police visibly enforced lockdown”; two of the three never did! Sure, in Korea at times non-essential domestic travel and public events were suppressed, certain venues (e.g. dance halls) were instructed to close and some cafes had to become takeout-only, but you can still move (even if strongly recommended to stay at home) and police presence was never visibly heightened.
Contrast with mainland China, where whole apartment buildings with people in them were quite non-figuratively sealed from outside.
What I hear from Koreans is that the police is a service, like a plumber: you have a problem, you call. They can’t enter your home, can’t invade your privacy and spot-check, etc. Law enforcement is so restricted by citizens’ own choice, as they had to deal with the opposite extreme recently enough that people still remember; they hold the government responsible and treasure the freedom they have.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-sinking-of-the-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_MV_Sewol
older voters might remember. issues from 2 elections ago. conditions have changed.
maybe 2 elections ago a hot issue was too many foreign workers. maybe 2 elections later businesses are unhappy about the difficulty of employing foreign workers.
my take is. its not so much a dictatorship, especially after lee kuan yew. but its pragmatic. whatever the majority wants, it will try to give.
not so much a dictatorship. but actually populist???
The same things that make the Asian peoples compliant with societal restrictions and "big government" might also leave them vulnerable to being led astray by those same governments, or tolerant of dictatorial actions. (and not just singling out Asian cultures here -- any authority-respecting people)
The same traits that make Americans uncooperative with government mandates might be a great protection against unreasonable actions of a tyrant. Or it could be a very bad weakness in a complex, connected economy.
After reading Jared Diamond's idea about the nature of cultural traits in Guns Germs Steel (though he didn't phrase it that way exactly), I think of that often when these things come up. A country's culture, ethos, political system (quite independent from individual behavior, as individuals quickly get absorbed into national behavior) determines a lot of how they survive or resist, or adapt.
The question is whether they have the right combination of traits to get them through the slew of challenges in aggregate, over time, that life throws at them randomly, to succeed in the long run.
Will the idea of big spending government also delivers the same outcome? If yes, how do we manage those so that we will not arrive at the great depression of 1929?
Where I live we get 10x the gov. budget deficit than the previous year and the government is reducing and eliminating taxes at the same time. So the "taxes" will come in the form of reduced value of money, or taxes in the future. Level of taxation is pretty much equivalent to the level of government spending. There's, no way around it.
On top of that, general population's savings are being depleted. So yeah, future is bleak. Anyway, I hope the gov spending will get to sane levels soon.
It doesn't help that this is the global phenomenon, so economy/currency is not crashing as much compared to the surrounding countries. But there are still wild swings of ~10% or so compared to USD or EUR.
Honest question, what mechanisms do you think will make this happen? Or is it more of a general hope-it-happens?
In my experience, getting anyone to spend less after they are used to spending a lot (be it a government, a company, a business unit, or even just your kids) simply doesn't happen, barring a fundamental change in circumstances whereby the alternate of continuing to spend a lot results in immediate ruin.
Time so switch to a better currency!
It's a pretty hard case to make that a disease which disproportionately killed health 20-30 year-olds led to mass prosperity.
Given all the advancements which were happening in the early 20th century, I'm inclined to say that prosperity happened in SPITE of WWI and the Spanish Flu. Who knows where we would be, had we avoided two huge human catastrophes.
That's exactly what happened during the black plague. It lead to the end of feudalism. A shortage of labor will absolutely boost the value of labor.
I don't know if that is the right lesson to learn. The great depression was largely caused by a stock market crash related to lack of regulation, and a drought (hello climate change). It was largely solved by big government wartime spending.
However in reality the deathtoll from COVID is scarcely distinguishable from regular influenza seasons. Only 0.06% of Sweden's population succumbed to COVID and their annual deaths are shaping up to be the same as prior years, for example. Similar situation in Germany.
A strong state apparatus without accountability or a principle of transcendent law -- that is a far "bigger" government than any in Asia currently. Really, people in Asia are still getting used to a smaller government.
[1] Facebook is full of nurses coming forward with this, and I know some people working at the hospital.