[Editorial] Tears of a Day Laborer

Uri Party leader Shin Gi-nam’s voice reportedly choked with tears while on a visit to a welfare facility as a day laborer began to shed tears. The worker was crying in front of a food tray. He was facing eviction from a 6,000-won-a-day cheap lodging house as he could not find any work in constructions sites. His tears choked out his words.

Is the day labor alone in facing the similar dead-end? The slump in the construction industry is felt to be the worst since the financial meltdown of 1997. The number of private construction contracts during the second quarter of the year fell by 27.5 percent year-on-year. It is not hard to imagine how many more of the 1.8 million construction workers would be shedding bloody tears now.

What an irony. The major justification the current government used to cool the construction industry was closing the gap between the rich and the poor. Now that day laborers are losing their jobs and middle-class families are suffering from skyrocketing property taxes on their houses, their sole properties, speculators are briskly penetrating the candidate sites for a new executive capital.

A myopic policy taken by the previous Kim Dae-jung administration to turn around the economy with an artificial boom in the real estate market and a deadly and reckless anti-market prescription made by the Roh Moo-hyun administration to annihilate the market in order to deflate housing prices seem to be opposite to each other. Nevertheless, once combined, they brought about a single consequence: the economy was dealt with a blow, and ordinary folks and low-income families were massively victimized along the way.

The intent of an economic policy does not justify the end. It takes expertise and experience to simultaneously capture ideal and reality, and positive and negative effects in the long as well as short term. It also takes flexibility and a sense of reality to maintain continuity in the policy’s framework while keeping up with the changes of time. Otherwise, there should be a vacillation in policy that barely plays catch-up.

In this respect, the move to transfer the fulcrum of real estate policy from Chief Presidential Economic Planner Lee Jung-woo to Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hyun-jae is fortunate although it has come late. The government must not change alone. The ruling Uri Party must change too.

It is nice of the Uri Party to exhibit a will to turn around public livelihood and the economy. However, if economic experts become timid in front of the party’s irrational reformists and ingratiate themselves with these people, they’d better remain disinterested. Leaving the economy in the hands of experts who deeply understand the market and who value free-market tenets is the way to wipe the tears of the public dry. We need a policy with a clear orientation, not a flip-flop.