A decade ago, famine killed an estimated one million people in North Korea. People kept dying until the communist regime accepted foreign aid to stop the chronic food shortages caused by their restrictive government policies. In many ways, these years were the good old days for North Korea before satellite dishes, Internet, DVDs, and in particular those pesky foreign aid workers started instilling negative thoughts into the populace. With all of these negative influences what is an evil despot to do?

Easy, turn back the clock by kicking out foreign aid workers, banning even the limited free market grain sales that had been helping to alleviate the food shortages, and revive the socialist ration system that led to the shortages the first time around. That should stave off unrest.

Here is how the ration system works. Officials sit behind a bank teller-like window and then dispense grain through a chute. Women queue up at the distribution centers instead of going to the market. Farmers have no incentive to produce as much as possible and the government sends troops out to farms to make sure that harvests are sent to the government centers instead of being sold in private markets where they might fetch higher prices. Other than widespread famine what could possibly go wrong?

Once again North Korea offers itself up as a laboratory about what happens when you ignore 200 years of economic theory and in particular the lessons learned over the past 50 years regarding motivating populations to produce more. Good luck guys.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 31st, 2005 at 11:14 am by Insider and is filed under Loons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.