Posted on 10/17/2015 8:17:12 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Why North Korea is so corrupt, and why that may be good
Official willingness to take bribes and ignore regulations has saved lives, but may present obstacles for reform
October 16th, 2015
Andrei Lankov
North Korea is probably the most corrupt country in Asia. Measuring corruption levels is difficult, and existing ratings (like the well-known index published annually by Transparency International) should be taken with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence appears persuasive enough: Official corruption in North Korea has been exceptional over the last 20 years.
In my frequent discussions with North Koreans, I have discovered the fact that most of them take a high level of corruption for granted. They assume that any official who is in a position to ask for bribes will. In fact, they are surprised if officials refuse bribes. Simply put, corruption is part of the fabric of daily life in North Korea today
/snip
Official corruption has been a relatively benevolent force in North Korea’s marketization and economic recovery, but will likely become an obstacle in future. Bribes and kickbacks have become a natural way of life for North Korean officials. When, sooner or later, North Korea acquires a more reasonable economic system, or even becomes part of a unified Korea, this ingrained habit is not going to disappear overnight. As a matter of fact, it is likely to continue for a long time – generations, perhaps.
In other words, even if under a new system officials are given good salaries, they are still likely to retain their habit of extorting bribes and embezzling everything they can. Of course, North Korea might change dramatically, but it is likely to remain a rather corrupt place. Needless to say, this is not does not bode well for further growth and economic development.
(Excerpt) Read more at nknews.org ...
P!
These guys should be writing for the DemocRats!!!
North Korea...where corruption looks good compared to chia head evil.
Is it really more corrupt that the current g0vt of the USA?
read the piece with Baltimore inserted instead of North Korea
Apparently, the world is big. The moment you thought you’ve seen it all, you find yourself staring at something worse.
My Grandfather told me that everybody I met would tell me that they are overworked and underpaid.
He was right.
So, what do you do if you feel you are underpaid?
You give yourself some extra benefits. You take stuff from where you work. You make customers pay you extra.
I was stationed at Fort Knox, KY in the 1980s. I lived in Government Quarters. That’s government housing. It came time for me to move. Before I could officially leave Fort Knox, I had to “clear quarters”. This meant that a GS employee from the housing office had to inspect where I lived to make sure I left everything there that was supposed to be there and that it was clean.
We didn’t have any kids, and my wife was a good housekeeper. I felt sure we would have no troubles passing the inspection. My peers to me to hire one of the local cleaning services. They told me horror stories of wives being left behind to prepare for the fifth or sixth inspection. You were not going to pass inspection unless you hired a cleaning crew because the cleaning crews had to bribe the government inspectors.
This was in the 1980s.
We hired a cleaning crew. It was two Korean wives of Soldiers. Unfortunately, we were there first customers.
All cleaning crews had a “pass inspection” guarantee.
Those two ladies had that place spit-shined.
It didn’t pass.
They spent another day cleaning.
Everything sparkled.
It didn’t pass.
They spent another day cleaning.
It didn’t pass.
I had to move on to my next assignment. I was out of time.
I pulled the two ladies aside. I told them that the next time the inspector came, they should meet him out side with a $20 bill folded up in their right hand. They should shake the inspector’s hand and pass him the money.
They did it.
We passed.
This was in America in the 1980s. Our government employees had to be bribed.
Everybody thinks they are underpaid. Even when they are at their condo in Hawaii.
YES, massively more corrupt. NOT everyone in the United States is named 'Clinton'...
Excellent story!
Wow...typical...
Right not all are called clinton but over half of all of all of Congress, the courts and police are democrats.
Yes.
Until Americans have lived in non-Western cultures, most of us will never fully understand how radical the Anglo-American concept of “Lex Rex” (i.e., the law is king, not the king is the law) really is. For much of the rest of the world, laws, business contracts, and even national constitutions are often guidelines, not hard and firm guarantees, and insisting on the written words is often considered undue “legalism.”
There are places where official government corruption is worse than Asia. I'm quite aware that Confucian ethics has provided a helpful corrective in Asian countries that is in some ways comparable to the Judeo-Christian ethics which, along with Greco-Roman concepts of law, is the root of the Western concept of loyalty to written laws rather than personal loyalty to individual rulers.
However, in countries such as North Korea where residual Confucian ethics have been replaced by aggressively atheist devotion to the leadership, truly horrible things can and do happen which are multiple orders of magnitude worse than things got in Communist nations of Europe. One would have to go to the Communist regimes of Africa to find places which are as corrupt as North Korea.
The problem is more than Communism, although Communism is certainly a big part of the problem. Once a government has encouraged active overthrow of the older social order, taken over private property, and encouraged the covetousness of the "working class" against those who have more money and property, and attacked any culture-based religious belief that one's actions will bring eternal consequences, all sorts of bad things can happen. While European Communist regimes could be brutal and vicious in their enforcement of government authority, government corruption in European Communism never got as bad as what happened in Asian or African Communism, and there are reasons for that.
Every traditional culture with long history develops certain social ethics and norms which makes people behave civilized. Communism completely shatters such a social order. Once the totalitarian state power crumbles, there is nothing left to keep a society civil. Communism leaves behind a lawless society with people of unfettered greed, little sense of shame or conscience, coupled with deep cynicism and nihilistic attitude
To varying degrees, it happened to some Eastern European countries, and in China. It will be worse in N. Korea after the current system dies off.
Cultural? Can you fill that thought out a little more... Thanks darrel.
Can you fill that thought out a little more......How about tribalism? “We elected a democracy (but only for my tribe). The rest we will not. We will give the billions of aid money from those suckers in the US. We will starve the other tribes to death and steal the money for our benefit. Solved?
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