'Growth' Is Dead

By Rick Ruffin

Korean people, your government is lying to you. Just like the American government has been lying to the American people for the last eight years.

Perhaps Lee Myung-bak learned these deceptive tactics from his friend George Bush when they were riding around in a golf cart at Camp David earlier this year.

Just recently The Korea Times reported that the Lee administration has been trying to silence critics of its current economic policy, just like the U.S. government has been trying to censor critics of the Iraq war for the last five years.

The government of South Korea, like the government of the U.S., is spinning the facts.

The fact of the matter is the economy isn't going to get any better any time soon. It isn't going to ``grow.'' It isn't going to do anything but stink and fester and the reason is growth is dead.

Let me repeat that. Growth is dead. That's because growth is based on consumption, and the market is saturated. People are fat and tired of shopping. They want to save.

Policymakers falsely believe that ``consumption is an important driver of economic growth.'' So wrote Christopher Lingle in the pages of this very newspaper.

We must move beyond the current view of growth to a new view of growth. Resources are limited, but knowledge is exponential. And even if we did find a way to grow oil in Petri dishes, do we really want to create more just so that we can consume it?

American writer Edward Abbey said it best when he wrote, ``Growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell.''

This is something the politicians of the world refuse to admit, although the people, who have been trying to keep an honest face on this whole mess, are finally starting to realize it.

All the people who supported Lee on his 747 plan have learned at long last that it was never meant to happen. It was a ridiculous pipe dream meant only to garner votes. I refuse to believe that President Lee actually thought it was possible. He can't be that naive.

The politicians have so much disdain for the people that they don't even refer to them as people anymore. We are mere consumers. Just listen to George W. Bush make a speech. He doesn't say ``The American People.'' He says, ``The American Consumer.''

(Actually, he says the 'merican consumer because there is no room for vowels in his quaint Texas twang.) That's it. We've all been reduced to simple automatons, whose only purpose in life is to shop 'till we drop.

And some people have taken that message to heart. Consider the thousands of American consumers ― er, people ― who lined up outside a Long Island Walmart and waited in the cold all night so that they could have first chance to purchase a Samsung flatscreen TV.

They smashed down the doors and trampled a security guard to death, all in the name of keeping the economy running the way the politicians want us to. God bless their capitalist hearts. And to think they might be prosecuted for such patriotic behavior!

Yes, let Detroit go. Let Hyundai and Kia and Daewoo go too. Korea will be a better place when people are free to walk down the street not having to do battle with countless pieces of illegally parked steel, plastic and glass. Even America has reached the point of SUV saturation.

Nobody is to blame but the greedy corporations. There is only so much room for SUVs and flat screen TVs. People are going to spend their disposable income on education and food, and put the balance in the bank, no matter how many tax cuts and rebates the government comes up with in order to stimulate spending.

No number of scantily-clad models in strapless dresses, pouting into the camera and leaning over the latest shiny offering from Detroit, Ulsan or Bupyeong, are going to raise the shoppers from their doldrums if there is no consumer confidence. ``Growth,'' for the time being, is dead.

Likewise, the South Korean construction market is all but on life support, but Lee Myung-bak is determined to revive it even if it means cutting down the last trees and pouring huge slabs of concrete, then challenging Dubai for the tallest building in the world.

There are simply no more flat places on which to build, unless, of course, we start building on rice fields. Now there's an idea!

Much of this mess could have been avoided if policymakers had followed a more sustainable, future-orientated, economic model in the first place.

A lot of companies are going to go belly up, and a lot of people will lose their jobs. But if this recession means fewer jackhammers, backhoes and dump-trucks tearing up the earth, kicking up dust clouds and creating an almighty mess, then by all means bring it on.

In the meantime President Lee will be frantically looking for a new ``growth engine.'' He should have as much luck finding it as his friend George Bush did finding those ``weapons of mass destruction.''

The writer, a graduate of University of Texas, Austin, now writes from Gangneung, Gangwon Province. He can be reached at rick_ruffin@yahoo.com.

[출처 : 코리아타임스]