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From Marxism to the Ideology of Free Society in 1989 Romania – Transition or Rupture?
The turbulent times in which a revolution takes place delegitimize almost any claim to understand in real time what is happening. Only after things have got back on track can a lucid, cold analysis of events be undertaken – in philosophical terms, the history’s power to reveal the truth is recognized –, and this is the case the 1989 Romanian Revolution. In that year, the population taken to the streets was hoping only for an improvement in living conditions or, rather, for a profound change that would, at one time, have led to a better life – here’s an outdated problem. It is certain that those events have led to substantial changes in Romania – among which the most important place seems to be held by the change of ideological-social commitments, at all levels. More
The Race to the Bottom in Oil
With the developed world in transition towards a short and medium-term economic self-flagellation as a means of reducing the impact of the SARS-COV-2 virus spread, there is little room for economic news that is not related to markets tumbling and toilet paper becoming contraband. While it started with the shutdown in Hubei province in China and the associated tough (but successful) quarantine and social distancing measures, the economic crisis has moved onto Western nations, where the collective impact of the virus has already exceeded that in China. The measures which the experts (and, reluctantly, and too late for comfort, the politicians) are calling for are throwing prodigious amounts of sand in the gears of a system that developed organically to thrive on mobility, access, just-in-time logistics and a global division of labor. Regardless of the terrifying human costs of the crisis, the economic consequences will be the making of the leadership and will unravel carefully synchronized supply and production chains, as well as industries on which the (precarious) livelihood of millions depends, such as tourism. More
Europe’s Paradigmatic Dilemmas amidst Pandemic Woes: How the Covid-19 Crisis May Reshape EU’s Geostrategy
The much-awaited vaccine has recently been announced and reignited hope that the coronavirus pandemic that has kept the planet in a tight grip for about a year now is about to end. Though the vaccine itself is not beyond suspicion as some question the methodology used to validate it (normally, vaccines are vetted after being tested over several years), the world is gasping for a glimmer of hope against a threat it has struggled to understand and contain with mixed success. After an initial wave in the first and second quarters of 2020 that brought most of the planet to a halt with businesses closing down, unemployment rising and trade plummeting, the lockdown measures succeeded in putting a damper on the spread of the virus, leading to a relaxation of the lockdown measures during the third quarter so as to breathe new life into the ailing economy. Yet, this has caused the virus to emerge once more, thereby sparking a new wave starting around the middle of the third quarter of 2020 and continuing to this day. More
The Power of Vague Things: A Cautionary Tale
Paul Valery contends that power is founded on belief (a “vague thing”). Harold J. Berman believes the rule of law relies more on moral force than a police force. Yet the modern positivist worldview emphasizes the practical rather than the moral dimension of power. What are some consequences of this positivist belief? More
On the Self-Testability of the Minimum Wage
As I have shown, in a previous intervention, in which I explained the conceptual difference between the minimum salary (the actual minimum wage, with the particularity that is generated by the market, rigorously called “minimum nominal salary”) and the minimal wage (administrative wage, with the particularity that it is administratively established, rigorously called “minimal nominal salary”) in the present intervention I will argue about the self-testability of the minimal wage. I have also shown, in the same intervention, that the establishment of the minimal wage without using a method by which it is methodologically anchored by a macroeconomic indicator, relevant for ensuring sustainable economic growth, entails the possibility of it functioning as an instrument of social protection only. More
Playing on High Difficulty: The Trade Barriers of Modern Video Gaming
Over the course of the last few decades, video games have evolved from being a niche of the entertainment industry to being a major pillar, generating revenues greater than even blockbuster films (Zackariasson & Wilson, 2010). Multinational companies invest tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars into developing the most technologically advanced video games they possibly can. These companies compete primarily on an international level, since only a global market can generate the returns that make such investment worthwhile. There is virtually no such thing as national gaming markets, outside of niched East Asian segments that are culturally alien to the globalized pastiche of Western culture. Another aspect worth pointing out is that the gaming market is increasingly of the “winner takes all” variety, where a product must, without exception, come up to the highest standards of quality for the category that it belongs to in order to have any chance against those offered by the competition (Nieborg, 2011a). These two factors combined mean that any game that is not good enough to achieve international success can be considered a failure. More
Brâncuși’s Endlessness and the Scarcity of Some Means
The public subscription for Brâncuși’s “The Wisdom of the Earth”, to get it from private hands “back” to the Romanian state, failed not so long ago. In markets, big money is paid for his works, more than “all” Romanians managed to gather. The moral? Art may be a public good, but it is, above all, and shall stay so, a private thrill as beauty is also in the eye of the legit beholder. More
Conservatism and Spiritual and Social Recovery
As I read newspapers, popular magazines, listen to National Public Radio, watch cable television, attend Catholic Mass, and work with American academics at the deracinated institutions called colleges, I am conscious that American secular culture has had at least one hundred years to effect a closing not only of the American mind but of the American soul as well. That is visible in large protests and vandalism and looting in the context of something called “Black Lives Matter.” Few if any except the revolutionaries who teach “community activists” in such matters are aware that the ideal to which they are responding was first conceived by Lenin in his 1902 essay, “What is to be Done?” In that essay Lenin outlined the methods that he believed would achieve a successful revolution in Czarist Russia. His methods included a) maintaining large non-Party organizations with mass membership controlled by communists; b) concentration on agitation of single ideas to foment discontent; and c) organized activism aimed at “the masses,” not exclusively the “proletariat.” More
The Fourth Estate. And So Forth
The press today makes it easier to formally prove one’s credentials as a journalist as opposed to one’s calling for the profession or even vocation, through personal probity and other underlying yet necessary qualities. You may say that this utterance is an opinion, a matter of taste or a value judgement. You may even call it confirmation bias. There is nothing wrong with such thoughts, but we say about journalism that, before values enter into the equation, it must concern itself with verifiable facts and objectivity. More
Are Planned Economies Our Destiny?
“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I am from the government and I am here to help”. These were not the words of an anarchist or a person opposing the concept of the state in general. These were the words of the head of probably the largest government in the world, President Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan saw very clearly that government should have limits and should leave most decisions to the free choice of free citizens. He followed the principle that the state should only do those things which only the state can do. More
Football-ism – The Ultimate Global Ideology
People(s) worshiping different deities and subject to different kinds of democracies, people(s) coming from older cultures or younger countries, all feel at home in the stands of stadiums or in the TV-oriented armchairs during football World Cups. Savian was yards away from Russian playgrounds and Vlad was inches away from HD screens. They play a friendly match in TMFI. More
The Professionalization of the Public/Political Decision-Making
The professionalization of the public decision-making involves, of course, two distinct semantic aspects: a) turning the politician - the public decision-maker into a professional; b) ensuring the professional character of the public decision-making process.The first requires that the person making public decisions (in general, the politician) become an expert in public decision-making. This is possible and even desirable, but here the term expert must be given a particular meaning. Typically, we call the expert a person who can formulate explanations (based, of course, on theories), that is, they can establish effective causality. In this sense, the politician cannot become an expert, because there would be a contradiction in terms. Therefore, according to the first significance of the professionalization of the public decision, the politician must become a professional not in the theoretical foundation of the public decision, but in the ethical foundation of it. The professional’s expertise in public decision-making will therefore consist in his ability to capture the common (or majority) interest of the community, to translate this interest into a political target and to co-ordinate social action towards achieving this goal (the content of the leadership concept). The “profession" of a politician therefore presupposes a specific competence, namely to build visions, to formulate (in interpersonal language) the objectives associated with those visions, to implement social mechanisms and procedures to achieve the objectives and to ensure the ethics of the distribution of public goods generated by achieving the objectives (i.e. the social justice). As we can see, the professionalism of the politician is not about designing means but designing goals. As goals do not imply an effective causality, but, as has been shown above, a teleological one, it results that the politician, the political decision-maker or the public decider, cannot be both an expert in the instrumental sense of the term. More
