Letters to the Editor
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The proper role of the state?
So what is the proper role of the state? This article implies that nurturing pet industries is the proper role, and that SK's "success" in maintaining cartoon studios is evidence of what can be achieved when the state fills this role.
If that is the assertion being made here, then I'd like two issues to be addressed:
1) What evidence is there that these cartoon studios would have left South Korea in the absence of these subsidies?
2) What evidence is there that SK's policies favoring cartooning haven't displaced other activities that would have produced equal or greater value for SK society?
The essential problem with these sorts of programs is that any society has limited resources, so that by dedicating those resources to any particular activity, you are necessarily depriving those resources from a different activity. The fact that the government is able to direct economic resources is not surprising, nor inherently praiseworthy. What would be impressive is if it could be demonstrated that this subsidy program makes use of resources that would have otherwise have gone to waste.
If this gain in efficiency can't be demonstrated, then our default assumption should be that this program simply produced another layer of bureaucracy (which costs $), without any benefit.