This effort reflects the struggle that has been occurring for a long time in United States History. Civic participation and economic freedoms in the United States were originally similar to European traditions of rule at the beginning of the country's history. Most political activity, including voting, was limited to white, male property holders, and mobility was limited in economic and social vectors. Gradually, the United States has begun to arrive at a guarantee of social and economic mobility for the entire population, regardless of race, gender, ability, or sexual …show more content…
The famines of the past four decades, and in particular of the 1990s, have questioned the ability of the government to provide this right. An effect of this situation, has been that citizens cease to feel an obligation to observe the civic duties laid out by the North Korean government. As Darren Cook observes in his article in the Stanford Reforming North Korea: Law, Politics, and the Market Economy, "Many citizens engaged in spontaneous economic activity in either state-sanctioned local markets or newly emergent unregulated markets that were the result of uncontrollable migration, creating a sort of informal and unusual marketization in some certain parts of North Korea" (Cook 171). These activities took place after extensive famines in the 1990s, meaning that after the government's duty towards it's own citizens to provide the necessary infrastructure for food distribution had failed. The public's sense of civic duty towards the ideological regulations of the government had faded, and been replaced by an instinct for survival that gave rise to a new sense of civic