Ha Joon Chang's best book ever

Gino Frobel

   Ha Joon Chang wrote a book called "Bad Samaritans" basically talking about the hypocrisy of Britain and America telling other developing countries they cannot use protectionism for economic growth despite the fact both countries used it to become world powers. With power of the IMF and the World Bank western nations and banks have pushed many nations to accept free trade. Ha Joon talks much of the dark side tremendous growth inflicted on the South Korean people as daughters had to flee families to work for urban rich folks working as maids or in dark factories. The Korean economic success was due mainly to market incentives and state direction and not the free-trade economy the international neo-liberal establishments try to install in the minds of people. State owned success stories of industries in other countries is explored as Chang goes through Singapore's airlines and other successful state-owned enterprises from around the world. Ha Joon talks about how remote areas would be adversely affected by private ventures that would have little incentive to invest in areas outside of their chosen markets. Privatization of industries leads to inefficiencies and inequality as they are free to direct salaries and mislead the public about why these salaries of managers and executive officers are somehow justified by the free market.

  Patent protectionism is another result of free markets and this ultimately leads to monopolies that squash innovation and lead to higher prices as companies as Microsoft have demonstrated for years making one man  so incredibly wealthy that he is considered a philanthropist because he gives away some of this excessive money to causes he feels is important in life. Ha Joon Chang spends a chapter talking about Microsoft and numerous trademark laws that transcend boundaries from corporate world that recognizes none. the role of the pharmaceutical companies avoiding bringing aids drugs to Africa is also mentioned in this book. Many of these large corporations are sometimes the leading force of  forced neo liberalism on developing nations to keep their market dominance.

   Ha Joon speaks about corruption being the pressing issue of developing nations and limited budgets dictated by foreign banks leads to more corruption that they then can come in and exploit. Deregulation has increased corruption in both the private and public sector of these countries. And Chang states this exists because there are too many market forces. These same market forces runs on the democratic principle of one dollar one vote. Ha Joon Chang is an economic professor that knows free markets are not good at promoting economic development for the masses and basically serves just to keep a small class in control of the nations resources and bad samaritans are those in this class that tell people in other countries how to run their country.