Rubrics » Bridging News
Romania, Above Eight EU Member States in Terms of Actual Individual Consumption
In international comparisons of national accounts data, such as GDP per capita, it is desirable not only to express the figures in a common currency, but also to adjust for differences in price levels. Failing to do so would result in an overestimation of GDP levels for countries with high price levels, relative to countries with low price levels. More
Fight (Book) Club
The war in Ukraine is the starting point for the creation of a new global structure. The process might last several decades. For the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West is truly faced with a united and purposeful adversary whose endgame is yet to be determined.In order to know how the future world will look, it is helpful to have some ideological fountainhead in order to be able to understand the ideological structures of the current major players. The existing philosophical backbones will be used to define new relationships on the global stage. More
Time – Resource and Currency
Although it is a work that appears – at first glance – to be very analytical, the essence of this book is a relatively simple one – a practical vision for a better world.Continuing the ideas expressed in another book by the same author (For a Golden Romania [Pentru o Românie de Aur – in Romanian] in which the vision of the Romanian economist Anghel Rugină was brought back to light, especially regarding the issue of money – that should be completely backed in precious metals – and monetary systems – either in place, historically, or theoretically imaginable), in Time – Resource and Currency [Timpul – Resursă și monedă – in Romanian], Octavian Bădescu delves into a deep inquiry on the nature of money and its logical and practical essence, while exhorting readers to return with him to the “fundamentals” of economic reasoning. More
How Time Flies in Cambridge and Why It Matters
I spent the 2022 winter holidays in Cambridge, UK. When we say Cambridge, we Romanians think primarily of the university, the University of Cambridge, although our Romanian mental image of a university is very different from theirs. And the fact that when we hear Cambridge we think most often of Cambridge, the English city on the River Cam, is yet another proof of our Eurocentrism. Why? Because Cambridge, UK [1], is different from Cambridge, MA [2], which is the seat of another great university, that of Harvard University, or Cambridge, Ontario, Canada [3]. For fun or information, there seem to be about fifteen places named Cambridge around the world [4]. More
The American Elections Confirm the Course Will Be Maintained in Foreign Policy
During the recent midterm congressional elections, I had the opportunity to observe a polarized nation at the ground level while in Washington, DC. This was a competition in which political affiliation has become an element of identity as strong as, if not stronger than, race or religion. The Republicans talked about inflation and mismanagement of the economy, while the Democrats marched on the emotional message of the democracy under attack. In such a polarized society, there are no strong victories – the party in the White House has a habit of losing in the first midterm elections after the presidential campaign promises of rivers milk and honey fail to materialize; the Republican tsunami did not materialize, either, bypassing the Democrat majority in the Senate and winning a very small majority in the House of Representatives. In practice, the Republicans can only frustrate the Democrats. Any achievement in the next two years will have to come through bipartisan means, at a time of peak political and societal tension. Like the presidential elections, the congressional elections ended up being decided by the skin of one’s teeth, generating precarious and contrary majorities, deepening the political decay of the American state. More
China’s Economic Role Amid the Prolonged War in Ukraine
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, China’s position on the war has been a topic of discussion. Unlike Western countries’ consistent condemnation of Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine, China’s attitude has been inconsistent. At the beginning of the war, the spokesperson of Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hua Chunying, challenged the Western media’s use of the word “invasion” and called Russia’s activity a “special military operation.” While refusing to condemn Russia, China also withheld strong backing for its former communist ally. Although China abstained from several votes at the United Nations that opposed Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, it did not join Russia in voting against a UN Human Rights Council resolution that condemned Moscow either.[3] In addition, China affirmed its support for the territorial integrity of sovereign states, including Ukraine, and called for the Minsk Agreement”[4] to be implemented to resolve the war.[5] Nevertheless, China continued to hold military exercises with Russia while President Biden was visiting the region in May 2022. [6] More
GfK: Romania, 51% below the European Purchasing Power Average in 2022
Romania had a spending potential of €8,017 per capita in 2022. This is 51% below the European average and puts the Romanians in 31st place. Compared to the previous year, the gap between counties with high and low purchasing power has widened even further.In the top 10 ranking, Bucharest is clearly leading the field with a per capita purchasing power of €15,482. This means that the inhabitants of the capital have more than 93% more purchasing power than the national average and 3.6 times more than the inhabitants of Vaslui County, which has the lowest purchasing power in terms of spending and saving. Here, disposable net income is just €4,728, which is around 53%of the national average. More
The Anti-Capitalist Mentality: A Big Problem for Romania
Decades of anti-capitalist propaganda have left deep traces in Romanian collective psyche, which causes poverty, unemployment, corruption, etc., to have an air of verisimilitude to capitalism, not to the reminiscences of communism.The word “capitalism” comes from “capital”, which derives from “caput, capitalis”, meaning heads of cattle (lat.), once identified with wealth, in general. It is first attested in 1850 in the writings of Louis Blanc, a French politician and historian of socialist political orientation.[1] However, it remained little used, being ignored even by Karl Marx in his famous book, Capital, published in 1867. The word penetrated with full force into political discussions only at the beginning of the 20th century, namely as an antonym for socialism. In scientific circles, it was validated by Werner Sombart’s brilliant book, Der Moderne Kapitalismus (1902). Although it was not used by Marx, this word was quite naturally incorporated into the Marxist conception, according to which the history of mankind comprises the following social arrangements (modes of production): the primitive commune, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and communism (called in its first stage “socialism”). The word “capitalism” is therefore polysemic, being used in politics and ideology as well as in scientific language. Hence, probably, the ambiguity of its destiny. More
The Reality of War
The 24th of February, the Russian invasion of Ukraine rather slowly awoke Europe to the forgotten reality of war. Despite the numerous armed conflicts all over the continent and in the world at large in which Westerners have been involved during the last three or seventy decades, Europeans in particular have forgotten the primary meaning of war. War as part of human nature, war as politics, war as a social state. This is due to something more than the usual dose of “Western hypocrisy” and double standards. Far from constituting an irrational choice, as narrow self-interested ideologies suggest, war has generally been viewed throughout most of human history as a character building activity on par with many others of a more peaceful nature, in which individuals were cultivated and through which societies were forged, maintained, expanded or destroyed. The paradox of contemporary Europe is therefore not that it denies war, its political and social function, but that the European identity is nothing but the product of the repressed memory of war. This is why it takes longer for Europeans to absorb the new reality: they must not only look at the facts around them, but also look inside them and accept their true selves as well. More
Capturing the Commanding Heights
Half a century ago the German sociologist Helmut Schelsky succinctly dissected the political strategy of left-wing radicals in West Germany and the West generally. His essay, “The New Strategy of Revolution,” remains one of the best summaries of a remarkably successful ongoing strategy of cultural subversion by way of a “long march through the institutions.” As a consequence, our present day is dominated by what Michael Polanyi called moral inversion – and Roger Scruton called a culture of repudiation – which redefine the common ethos and the rules of public discourse. Scruton argued that the West is characterized by “a political process generating corporate agency, collective responsibility, and moral personality in the state.”[1] Citizens of the West live in what he calls a Personal State, which protects their rights wherever they go. The question today is whether the new strategy of revolution is converting the Personal State into something akin to a reeducation camp and turning citizens into subjects. More
Dead Men Tell Many Tales
An estimated 18 000 civilian deaths, 1250 of whom are children; over 17 million people who have fled Ukraine in 2022; a shrinking of the Ukrainian economy by 35%; a staggering total of 200 000 military casualties evenly split between Russia and Ukraine; an increase in European gas and electricity prices by well over 100% between February and September 2022; these are the estimated numbers describing the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that began on 24 February 2022. As is typical of any war, it is frustratingly difficult to get any reasonably accurate numbers of the effects of the war, as each side will likely attempt to use the figures in order to project its own military might (by inflating the number of enemy soldiers killed and minimising its own deaths) as well as to gain the moral high ground and demonise the opponent’s war efforts (by reporting greater civilian deaths caused by the enemy and minimising those inflicted by its own troops). As is also typical of any war, there is a certain dry cynicism to using numbers to describe the proceedings of the war. Numbers fail to convey the tales that the dead tell through their damning silence in mass graves, and pale next to the unnerving accounts of those who have survived the horrors, though few of these are unscathed. Numbers fail to capture the full extent of the humanitarian damage done, the unspeakable atrocities committed, the manner in which war brings out the absolute worst in people, the trauma caused, and the resentment it breeds among the innocents on both camps towards each other that will endure throughout generations, even long after the war will have ended. They do, however, reveal an unsavoury reality that took most of Western Europe by surprise, namely that war and armed conflict are still a part of Europe’s contemporary geopolitical reality. More
Where We Head to When There’s Nowhere to Run
The phrase “life is a struggle” aptly describes the experience of writing about anything other than the ongoing war a year after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, but so much has already been written on the topic (and so much will yet be written – in vain, though) that a distraction would be welcome for the sake of mental sanity. Thus, we “struggle” with the temptation to join the “library” division of the corps of strategists operating deep behind the front lines, specifically the “armchair reasoning” battalion of the “ex cathedra” regiment. Nevertheless, it is impossible to keep at it indefinitely, for the boomerang of wandering thoughts will follow its own course, no matter how much one may try to shift one’s mind away from the unceasing horrors. In Sci-Fi literature and cinema, the desolation of Mother Earth following a (nuclear, technological, environmental etc.) cataclysm is usually coupled with the remaining population fleeing to the unknown worlds of outer space and/or retreating to the catacombs of what’s left of the planet, partially sedated through immersion in surrogate cyber-realities. In other words, it is an outward and/or inward escape. More
