Rubrics » Bridging News
Protecting Fiscal and Constitutional Integrity
Liberty thrives under rule of law when it applies equally to all. What Francis Lieber called institutional liberty hinges on a willingness of the public and their leaders to recognize and uphold constitutional limitations on the state. Civil liberty and self-government suffer when the law is misused as an ideological instrument to remold society. Given the relative ease with which institutions are captured and diverted from their original purposes, political courage is required to resist, oppose, and reverse any acquired needs or rights which might result. Two 19C American exemplars of principled resistance to plunder are President Grover Cleveland and Justice Stephen Field. More
CAPITOL LETTERS (Ep. 6): The Gam(bl)er (Former and Future?) POTUS
As a student, I used to sleep at night, as my days were fulfilling and filled with my studies and the like. My nights as a student in the dorm room were (for the most part) buzzing with an “audio-video” ecosystem. I contributed to the “video” aspect with a blindingly bright lamp that glowed with the power of the noon Sun itself, which watched over me as I dozed off to sleep under the sway of a book or gazette. The “audio” side was supported by my nocturnal roommates, masters/slaves (?) of games – video games, to be more precise. The poorly silenced background noise that occasionally startled me in the dead of night was woven of dialogues, spoken ritualistically and rhythmically with the melodic cadence of a talking lathe. Yet, it was not my companions that spoke. It was the “conversation” between the interfaces of the video games and the players viewing them on the screens, its phraseology both mechanistic and minimalistic. Into that blurry state between wakefulness and sleep, between reality and dreams, the environment would pour into my ears either the robotic “communiqués” of the proto-AIs in Age of Empires and Warcraft (strategy rodeos) or the commando-esque “communication” from Counter-Strike and Half-Life (adrenaline simulators), only rarely interrupted by rounds of human speech, except for when multiplayer sessions were in order. More
Give Us, God, Our Daily Experts (Part I)
On the concept of expert, as semantically opposed to the concept of the politician, I had spoken many times before, including, if I remember well, under this heading too. More exactly, in principle, the politician is an expert of purposes, while the expert is a politician of means. Beyond the paronomasia involved, I want to say that the politician should be required to establish the purposes by ignoring the necessary means for their achieving, while the expert should be required to establish the means (most) appropriate for a given purpose. One consequence of such a Manicheism is the following: it is recommended to avoid the appointment of a (genuine) expert as a minister, for example, and, symmetrically, to avoid the appointment of a politician as an expert. Of course, the social practice usually ignores such a “normative” conclusion. However, essentially, this time, I do not want to take over this important distinction, but I would talk about the army of experts (some of which being genuine and some impostors), generally giving consultations through the TV screen on any issue you could imagine. More
CAPITOL LETTERS (Ep. 5): The Antinomies of the Universe
Philosophers, scientists, theologians, all appear to live with a somehow implicit and inbuilt mindset that the physical/metaphysical Universe is, despite its obvious oneness, a binary being. More
Voices from the Goulash Archipelago
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has made his yearly pilgrimages to Băile Tușnad (Tusnádfürdő in Hungarian) in Romania into opportunities for oracular speeches on the fate of the Hungarian nation and for the West. This is part of his successful attempt to portray himself to the electorate back home and in the Hungarian near abroad, but also for partners in the West and the East, as a visionary statesman addressing civilizational and national decline rather than just another opportunistic politician seeing a line he could cynically use. His forays into ideological dialogue with American and European political forces (through appearances by him and his allies in CPAC in the US and the recent National Conservatism Conference in Brussels) have made him a persona non grata to the European liberal set, but also raised his and his country’s stature in the minds of disaffected Westerners. His recent speech in Băile Tușnad / Tusnádfürdő was erudite and wide ranging, and inspired significant outcry in Europe and, partly, in the US, through his use of racial language in describing Western decline and his hopes for Hungarian continuity and flourishing. Everybody and his mother are either praising or attacking Orbán for this speech and I thought I would briefly throw my hat into the ring, not necessarily for commenting his speech but rather the metapolitical context in which it was made. More
CAPITOL LETTERS (Ep. 4): The Smithsonian Republic of Knowledge
Patronage is living proof that exceptional public goods can be produced, at least in part, privately. And this goes against the emphatical treatises on economics that theorize and preach the contrary. And when the theory seems far too dry for a journalistic incursion, history comes with (un)sweet(ened) evidence. In the summer of 1829, a certain James Smithson had bitten the dust in Italy, the one from whose glorious gens, that of ancient Rome, Gaius Maecenas descended, diplomat and advisor to the emperor Octavian Augustus and documented as, indeed, the first “patron of the arts”. Smithson, a respected British chemist and mineralogist (after whom zinc carbonate was dubbed Smithsonite), an early member of the Royal Society of London (only a year after graduating from college), had left behind him a will with a strange stipulation: should his only grandson die without issue, his fortune would go the way of the United States of America “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge”. Okay, but what’s the catch? Smithson had never set foot in America! More
Today We Are Paying the Bill for Rapid Economic Growth
Rapid economic growth brings a lot of good things. If it also improves people's quality of life then we can talk solely about the benefits themselves. Except that something makes a difference. This rapid prosperity has to be paid for, sometimes long after the fact.Today we are faced with a confluence of many adverse phenomena and events. The Covid-19 Pandemic and the war in Ukraine accelerated the crisis and in fact already in some countries recession and caused a multi-level spiral of consequences. Added to all this is the global climate crisis. More
Political Uncertainty and Inflation
Recent political events in Romania (the removal of some ministers, the dissolution of the ruling coalition, the dismissal of the government by a motion of no confidence etc.) created a great deal of uncertainty regarding fiscal, monetary and legislative policy. The measures promised or claimed by politicians in response to the powerful impact of the energy crisis on the Romanian economy and society, which have already been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, increase this uncertainty. In particular, uncertainty concerns the nature, magnitude, and timing of financial support measures for the population and businesses, the monetary policy measures projected by the National Bank for the inflation slowdown, absorption of EU funds, sustainability of public debt etc. Many public voices, from journalists to analysts of credit rating agencies and international financial institutions, warned that this uncertainty about the conduct of economic policy is affecting the behavior of businesses and the population in terms of production and consumption expenditure, investments, new jobs creation etc. More
CAPITOL LETTERS (Ep. 3): The Price of Pricing the Priceless
The intensifying dialogue among social sciences is one of the most insightful contemporary academic advancements. Promising gains stem from interdisciplinarity, by connecting themes and concepts from a variety of fields, engaging them as parts of a Wertfrei system (of scientific nature), as well as a Weltanschauung (of cultural nature), rather than stockpiling merely discrete ingredients. For instance, the bonds between cultural studies and economic sciences – perennial, as they exist “materially” married, yet peripheral, as they seem “spiritually” divorced – may be revisited and reviewed against the intertwined backgrounds of: ideological mindset (e.g., liberalism, statism), technological mastership (e.g., industry “4.0”) and ecological momentum (e.g., climate, recycling). It is in the midst of the cogitations on the future of “humanity” (both the species and its spirit) – given chronic/acute ideological clashes, given technological shifts in leisure habits and in labor markets, also recasting micro-/meso-/macro-/mondo- business structures/relations, and given ecological encumbrances, under- or over-valued – that I’m roaming some of the finest American museums and libraries. More
New Developmentalism, Old Ideas
The so-called anti-austerity backlash in Romania, led by the now defunct unnatural alliance between the National Liberal Party (PNL) and the Social Democratic Party (PSD) of eight years ago, has kept the Romanian public on the edge and can even be credited with electoral success, but its actual anti-austerity policies are quite hard to pin down. Despite a lot of angry rhetoric, until 2015 the USL (Social-Liberal Union) government’s fiscal policy basically followed, with minor tweaks, the 2010 much maligned austerity measures put in place after an external financing agreement with international financial institutions. The 2015 tax cuts were basically a Trump-style “neoliberal” supply-side fiscal stimulus that the most leftish, non-PSD aligned, commenters criticized as the climax of post-communist Social-Democratic hypocrisy, surpassing in scale even the 2005 introduction of the flat income tax. It is only in the last year or two that the PSD government has actually strayed from more or less orthodox, even if sometimes ill-timed, fiscal policies, by adopting an ill-designed bank-assets tax, as well as a turnover tax for the energy and telecommunication companies, in order to finance a growing deficit ahead of a major electoral year. Nevertheless, there is actually a heterogeneous group of both Social-Democratic as well as National-Liberal economists that claims to propose a radically different, heterodox, set of economic policies and which has gained considerable influence over policymaking. More
The Three Seas Initiative – Much Ado about Something
In pre-war Poland, Marshal Józef Piłsudski developed a grand strategy titled Prometheanism, which meant to weaken the Russian Empire and its successor state, the Soviet Union, by encouraging national independence movements. The movement eventually incorporated a related initiative, that of the Intermarium, a system of alliances, which some had hoped would become a future Federation, linking the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, as a united front against the advance of the Soviet juggernaut. It failed, but the concept held lingering appeal and was resurrected time and time again as a geopolitical solution to perennial Eastern European insecurity in relation to Russia in its various incarnations. More
Karl Marx and Switzerland
“The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx (1818-83) is at bottom simple: Karl Marx was a communist”.Rothbard (1995, 317) succinctly makes a crucial point for understanding Marx: His ideas are not primarily about economics, sociology, of philosophy – let alone about singular or aggregate law-like relationships such as wage and value, time and investment, household formation and capital accumulation. If Marx dwelt in those issues, it was only to serve his ultimate aim, the definition and institution of a new society, or, his version of communism.Marxian Communism is not the outcome of some social mechanism. It is a goal to which all social mechanisms should be subservient. This goal equally subdues issues, theories, and frames of reference to its own implementation. While other forms of communism believed that such a system would be the eventual outcome, or, the synthesis, of human evolution, Marxian Communism was revolutionary. It is conceptualized as a synthesis, but one that has to be actively sought by revolution and enforced by the revolutionaries. Marxian Communism was about how to force and enforce the synthesis, thus, his idea of a synthesis was that human evolution as such is and shall be determined by an all-encompassing, synthetic, system. More
