In South Korea, a Protester’s Lone Fight Against Samsung
I&#x27;m Korean ethnicity, but Canadian born, my wife is Korean ethnicity and Korean born.  We keep talking about whether or not to live in Korea.  Korea has seen more rapid economic advancement than any other country in the world.  Yeah, I&#x27;m saying it beats out China in that regard.  I work in China, and while China&#x27;s progress has been insane, Korea&#x27;s at a place where China is not yet.  So the debate is live in Korea, Canada, or somewhere else (or could just continue working in China, but difficult to call China home, given our backgrounds).<p>The #1 reason why I wouldn&#x27;t prefer Korea is because Samsung and other chaebols have too much of a grip on the country.  They don&#x27;t play fair.  They don&#x27;t give other companies even a chance to disrupt them.  It&#x27;s worse than what Microsoft was like in the 90s because at least Microsoft didn&#x27;t blatantly bribe and corrupt the highest levels of government.  They manipulate the stock market extremely maliciously to take out competitors before they can become disruptive.  I attended a lecture from a professor at Seoul National University who was an advisor to the government on how to get them to make the stock market more fair and allow companies to grow and achieve success.  It was startling to what extent the stock market got manipulated.<p>Never mind the idea of starting a company and being able to have a great exit.  Even if I was just a normal worker, how would my retirement funds be able to grow in that kind of a stock market, even if my employer matched contributions?  I&#x27;d be dependent on only my bank account savings for retirement, no chance for reinvestment.  Or my retirement funds are all tied into the prospects of my employer&#x27;s stock?  Also scary, zero risk diversification.<p>I think Korea&#x27;s long-term growth prospects will be severely limited as long as the chaebols have a stranglehold on the economy.  I am hopeful by the fact that they let Hanjin go bankrupt.  Apparently, everyone in Hanjin was just completely complacent and waiting for the government to bail them out.  When they didn&#x27;t get bailed out, it was a sign that the new government was willing to make some of the hard decisions necessary to allow for a properly entrepreneurial society to thrive.