Playful lessons for Kim Jong-eun Reviewed, by Mark A DeWeaver

By · February 6, 2012 · No comments
Opinion ·

The latest book by Princeton University political philosopher Daniel Cloud, is dedicated to North Korea’s new Paramount Leader Kim Jong-eun. It is a pitch for economic and political freedom as the surest route to membership in what Pyongyang’s “unofficial spokesman” Kim Myong Chol calls the “elite club of strong and prosperous states.” (See North Korea nears age of affluence, Asia Times Online, Aug 11, 2011.) As the North hopes to join this club as early as this year, Cloud’s gift to the Young General could not have come at a better time.

You might think that authoritarian regimes should have an advantage over free societies because they can force people to conform to a rational plan. Freedom, it would seem, isn’t free – it comes at the cost of irrationality. Free enterprise results in Hilferding’s “anarchic production,” democracy in Marx’s “parliamentary cretinism.” Shouldn’t the North Korean way of doing things be better?  (Asia Times)

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