Institutul Ludwig von Mises România

0:00Vlad Topan, I'm saying your name right at the outset so that I get it right, Vlad Topan from the Mises Institute, Romania, it's a pleasure to have you in our building and our Thank you. It's a pleasure for me to be here. When was the Mises Institute, Romania, founded? Formally, the Institute was founded in 2001, but informally it was already in existence in mid-90s in the form of a bi-weekly seminar conducted by Cristian Comanescu, the man who founded the institute.

1:00Yes. And Misesian thought had already been circulating even after the revolution.

1:10This person, Cristian Comanescu, was actually the first Rothbardian, and so to speak in Romania. He was a student in a master program in the political science department of the University of Bucharest and he found in some collection, in French, some articles written by Rothbard and he was, how should I say, captured by Rothbardian thought, and then he started digging more and he found the Mises Institute, he was here before 95, I think, so he found out about Mises, the Austrian School, many many authors that were writing at that time so when he came back to Bucharest the first thing he did he started a seminar he became an evangelist and and cultivating students and you were you one of the students at the time no i joined this issue only in 2002 when it was already formally established they already had a quite nice website and I joined the seminars, the Mises seminar, the main activity of the Institute back then was the Mises, the private Mises seminar, every other week on Fridays as Mises used to do it in Vienna

2:50and I was recommended by another important Romanian, Austrian so to speak, Marius Spiridon, he was the, if I may say so, the second head of the institute at the beginning, Cristian Comanescu, together with Mario Spiridon, actually made the institute, what the Romanian Mises Institute, what it is presently. And it's a pretty important center for classical liberal thought in Romania. I would say Romania does not quite have a tradition, a very strong and important tradition of Classical Liberal Thinking Actually, it's quite sad to say that not even a decent form of the classical liberal laissez-faire program has been applied into Romania at any time in history.

3:57We have a version of Romanian liberalism, there is a Romanian Liberal Party. There were, before the communist period, Romanian liberal parties, but they were statist in a very pronounced manner. So it was only the new version of statism, and that's why they were called the liberals. But actually, at one point in Romania, they were called the Reds, actually the Reds. So left and right have unclear meanings there in Romania, just as in the United States. You were ten years old when Ceausescu was overthrown. This memory of communism and life under communism is a living memory for you.

4:49Yes it is, it is. I lived for a while in a village and then I moved in a town in the north-western part of Romania as I was entering the school. And I remember quite a lot of things, things like, for instance, I was a pioneer. I don't know what the word, the English word would be. pioneer. It's a political designation. Yes, it's a regimentation of school kids. There was even some type of regimentation for preschool kids, for kindergarten kids. They were actually the translation would be Hawks of the Country, Choi mi patrie, and so you are forced in the second grade to become one, basically.

5:51I remember bread rationing and standing in queues to buy bread. I remember gasoline rationing. Actually, it was really funny to see a couple of kilometers or even longer queues with cars standing in line and prices all controlled yes the state state provided oil yes and the quantities controlled how much each person could buy and with some coupons against some coupons not actually money you and the coupons themselves would trade on the black market right okay i don't remember i I guess they were nominal or something like that, so this option was not available.

6:42But I remember my town neighbors negotiating with one another to go together with two cars to stand in that queue, because one had to work at the same time. So the queue would be on for days. So you have to take a day off or two days or three days off from work so that you can get gas? So persons would cooperate. Let's go together with two cars and put them there together. I go to work and you move both cars. You drive one and then drive the other. And the other half of the day I will come and you go to your work and I will do the the same for you also, and this is how buying gasoline would work in my town.

7:32And many other elements, I don't know, from the curriculum in school in which as small kids we would learn about steel plants and how nice a round of steel producing is for the environment of the working class, to whatever, a silly joke toward a police officer back then it was called militia, Russian sounding, would mean, would be very dangerous, okay, so these cops would have a certain team, they would support the soccer team, football team and The kids would cry against that particular thing, so you might get into trouble even after silly jokes like this.

8:31But I was a little kid so I didn't see the whole mess and I discovered it only after reading later materials about the whole period. Surely, to some extent, the birth of a kind of Misesian thought in Romania in the mid-1990s with Cominescu's seminar and then afterwards, is to some extent inspired by the memory of life under Cominescu and communism and the lessons it teaches. Yes, pretty much. Austrian ideas have a particular appeal, I guess, to Romanians and to the general public in Romania because the general public there cannot be so easily fooled by socialist ideas anymore.

9:20At least now, what about the generation that knows nothing about this? I mean, soon this will be not ancient history but very old history. We are. Actually, if you brought that up, we are at the turning point now. My students, The generation of students that I have this year and the last year are students which were born in 89 or after 89. So they know nothing of communist times. So people talk about this, they think, yeah, yeah, the old days. Yes. Before that, they knew what I was talking about in comparative economic systems. I should say, too, that you teach economics at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies And formally the students knew what I was talking about.

10:19They were interested in hearing my opinion. The new generations of students don't quite understand why do I explain so much these aspects. Well, even in this country we had a profound sense after the collapse of all these regimes in 1989 and 1990, that if we were going to learn a lesson from this experience, we'd better learn it now, because there will come a time when it will be completely forgotten, and that's when we're going to learn the lesson from this experience, because that's when we're going to learn the lesson from this experience, because that's when we're going to learn the lesson from this experience, And it seems like, then, you're saying that window of opportunity is kind of closing.

11:07It is about to be closing, yes, particularly with this economic crisis that we are facing. In Romania there are also voices saying that, well, maybe we should revert back to more intervention to, I don't know, a little bit more inflation, price controls, public works and projects. More of a mixed system. Yes. And a widespread impression that what Romania has today is something like capitalism, which I'm sure is not true. No, it's a heavily hampered market economy, and this was all through the 90s.

11:56and the first decade of the third millennium, but with the help of a huge black market, the economy was doing quite well, especially after 2000. It was doing quite well. We experienced a period of economic growth and sometimes I say that when I will speak Think about this period, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, I might refer to it as the heyday of capitalism in Romania. I hope that will not happen. There were economic reforms following the fall of Ceausescu, denationalizations and privatization of industry?

12:42Yes, yes. There were reforms, but we adopted the so-called gradual strategy. As opposed to Poland, for instance, who adopted the shock therapy strategy, we were more on this gradual... I recall thinking that Poland wasn't shocking enough, so... No, for Romanian standards, it was too much, too much. Actually, prime minister, which I don't know, in 91 or 92, wanted to remove the price controls was more fully and to privatize more fully the economy was set up and put aside actually in the first coming of the miners to Bucharest.

13:40Maybe you have heard of this phenomena which are peculiar to Romania in the post-89 period. In Romania they are called Mineriade. It means miners, so those who work in the mines in a part of Romania, which is quite far from Bucharest, come en masse to Bucharest to put down some protests of these silly guys who want, I don't know, more democracy, more free the market is more departing from the former communist leaders, policies, values, way of life, so on and so forth. So the mines now are private?

14:28No, no, no. Still national? Oil? Still national? It's complicated. But it's not private in any case? Not quite private. And housing private? Yes, yes, yes. And construction? Constructions. I remember one of the things that made me, that intrigued me about Ceausescu is all of his, the building that he did, especially in Bucharest, just vast concrete structures that he identified this with a sense of National Glory. Yes, yes. He did his boat in Bucharest where he raised a few traditional neighbors in order to plan again the new face of Bucharest. And part of this project is the so-called House of the People, famous because it's really huge. I know at one point it was the second building in the world after the Pentagon.

15:25Today I think that's the Ronald Reagan building in Washington. We have our own trouble with politicians who build enormous structures for the sake of national glory, so I'm not speaking to you in a patronizing way or anything. Yes, and on this point he had a program to, as he put it, systematize the villages. In his strive to urbanize the country, he wanted to change all the traditional villages and maybe convert as many of them as possible into small towns. So he built flats in villages. That sounds a little like Mao's demographic dreams, moving people from here to there so they can become more this way or that way or whatever.

16:17Too many people here, not enough people there. To have the country more urban, to report a higher percentage of population living in urban areas. And he actually moved quite a great deal of people from villages into towns in order to operate his factories. But it's intriguing to me, you know, when you look at a regime like Ceausescu's, You look at it from the outside and it looks like what Martin van Creveld called a personal state, an entire state structure that seemed to be ruled by one person and even owned entirely by one person, and yet he's shot with his wife, he's gone, the regime collapses, but even then there was something that remained, namely the state, right? Very interesting.

17:14I guess it would be a naiveté to call the Romanian state a personal state. At the end of his regime, he was so remote from the realities of the country, which didn't quite get to him, that he was basically not quite knowing what was happening because the Secret Services and the Party apparatus filtered the information that got to him. That doesn't mean he had no actual thought in that. But it was an oligarchical system, more than a personal system. So it was not Ceaușescu by himself or together with his wife.

18:01It hardly ever is, right? It sometimes seems this way from the outside, like, oh, Gaddafi runs the government of Libya or Saddam Hussein is the government of Iraq, it's never like this. That goes besides the point and maybe misses the more guilty figures in there. And would you say that the state that's now in place, the structure, is largely made up of or is in large part made up of similar people, institutions, policies? In the first decade after 1989, I would say basically the same politicians as before were repackaged into democratic parties and stuff like that.

18:47But they were pretty much the same. And there is a certain change in the political class, but it is only by natural means, so to speak. the old, retire or die, and new ones come. And the slogans change, right? Yes, yes, the slogans change, no more slogans, as in communist times. But in practice, the new politicians pretty much quickly learned the tools that provide you with success in the political arena. So they are just reproductions of the older politicians. I think we can learn something from your experience beyond just that communism fails. We can learn that the state is not just the ruler, it's something else. And sometimes the ruler is just a kind of veneer on a table or something like this.

19:46Yes, the actual person is only the specific color of the face the state acquires at some So for true liberty to have prevailed in Romania, you needed more than just a collapse of communism or the collapse of one regime. You really need to tame completely this state apparatus. And that didn't happen really anywhere, did it, in Eastern Europe? Not quite. And I would say Romania fares pretty bad on this respect. I don't know very well, but the Eastern Germans, the Poles, the Czechs, they had some sort of a hygienical purge of former Secret Service officers and politicians. Those guys were forced to step aside a bit in Romania. Nothing like that really happened for good. I mean, There were some trials to do this, this purge of the political class, but they never succeeded.

21:00But even if they had purged the political class, I mean, it's, it's, the U.S. discovered this in Iraq. I mean, they tossed out everybody who is loyal to Saddam Hussein, and then there's a bunch of empty jobs. But they wanted their jobs to continue. They had, but they had to find new people to fill them, eventually filling them with the same old people. You know, so The problem is not so much the personnel, it's the position. Yes, there would have been probably a small improvement if completely different persons would have come at the helm of the state after 1989, because they would have been at least less skilled in plundering, less organized from top to bottom.

21:45But of course that would not have meant too much. They learn to use the state enterprise as time goes by. So there is another more important step, the ideological step, Romanians have to learn and had to learn after 1989 what freedom means because it's said to say in 1990s, in 1990, In the first three elections, the population voted en masse for the neocommunist option, so the population didn't want radical change. And there were actually visceral reactions to guys who came from abroad and wanted to to bring either liberalism or whatever, Christian democracy or whatever to Romania.

22:46There were, if I correctly remember, three candidates, the neo-communist one and two different ones and they were perceived as something very unpleasant by the greater majority of the population. And yet, most of the population in fact hated church rescue, right? I think in 1989, yes, it was clear. It seemed to be from the pictures, I mean. Ceausescu became a star. I'm not, let's say, the expert on these matters, but I would give you

23:23some facts. He became a star in 1968 when he didn't join the Warsaw Pact invasion of of Czechoslovakia, and that's when he acquired some political capital in the eyes of the intellectuals and of the general population. The former Stalinist period, so to speak, was considered to be ended. It was a little bit of opening of literary creation, a culture, a little better access to food and stuff. So he was loved then, Ceausescu was really loved then, and he was recognized internationally as a resident in the communist camp.

24:11The anti-Soviet communist, he was Washington's favorite communist for many years. He visited the Queen of England, he went to France, he came to US, he was l'enfant terrible of the communist camp, so to speak. Of course, it is now pretty well-known that he never quite bothered the Soviets. They allowed him to act in that way, but anyway, he was under control all the time, so the KGB knew it all along, what he's doing and why, and he probably did it with KGB approval. Am I right that even Ronald Reagan had a favorable, friendly relationship with Ceausescu, even as late as...

25:03In the beginning of the 80s, maybe. I don't know, but the 80s were the worst decade for Ceausescu, when the population finally see what he was all about, so no actual progress. The capital was completely depleted, nothing left, no food left, nothing, no product. Because he would constantly maintain the industrial structure of the economy with, I don't know, heavy industries, the steel, aluminium, whatever, machine production. He would constantly finance these industries by diminishing the standard of living and the options of the consumption of the populace. You know, the whole thing reminds me of this book, Pictures of a Socialistic Future. Did you read it?

25:48Richter, I just wrote this. It's like the story you're telling, except in the 1890s, but fiction. Yes, yes. The study case to complement the book. I'm sure, Wlad, that you get, and I did not intend to turn this into an interrogation about your views about Ceausescu, because it's all in the past, so tell me something about the present. Do you have economic students? You teach in a conventional economics department. And do you teach a mixture of mainstream? What is mainstream economics in Romania? So I work on two fronts, so to speak. I teach at this Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, in the Department of International Business and Economics, on the one hand. And on the other hand, And I'm president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Romania.

26:42At the institute I conduct a seminar. Cristian Comanescu has in a sense retired, although not quite so. So together with a few colleagues I took over that seminar and we have that seminar, the The main seminar, so to speak, in which we discuss the great treatise of the Austrian tradition, Human Action, Man Economy and State. And you have Human Action in Romanian? Yes. And that was a book that you published? No, we published online. It's available online freely and fully translated by Cristian Comaneșcu into Romanian. But we have not managed yet to publish it, to print it.

27:30What are the books that you published? We published, the first one was what has government done to our money, the Romanian version. Then we published Mises's bureaucracy, but together with Joseph Salerno's sports script and with Mises's original article on the socialist calculation. So these three things together, and I forgot to mention, with Rothbard, we published Guido Hülsmann's article on Euro, Rothbardian interpretation of recent monetary history.

28:18Which has not been translated to English at all. Yes, I think it's only in French. So those two together, and these three together. And the third book that we published, translated by the late Diana Kostya and finished by Tudor Smirna, the present executive director at our institute, we published Professor De Soto's book, Yes Money, Banking and Economic Cycles.

28:58We actually had Professor De Soto come to Bucharest this fall, in October. He lectured in Bucharest two times, at the Romanian-American University, and at the Academy of Economic Studies, where I teach. And then he also lectured in Iasi, a provincial town of Romania, where he also received a honorary degree from the university there. Well, he's a global superstar now, since the crisis happened. His book is in many languages, I think, and he travels everywhere as often as possible. And that still is a very big seller for us, too. And what is your textbook that you use in your classroom teaching? What do you use to teach?

29:43I teach, I have as my own course, Comparative Economic Policies, and I don't use a particular textbook, but I recommend articles and parts from treaties from Rothbard, Man Economy and State for instance, articles from The Logic of Action 102, I don't know, many, many from Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Hulsman. Online or you print them out? I recommend them to the students, to some of them. I give copies, they make their own copies. And there's many in English, though. Yes, in English. I actually lecture in a module, in a section, which is in English.

30:33So, most Romanian students speak English? Yes, yes. In Romania, it's not an asset anymore to know English. It's a common thing. for university students and intellectuals, I mean, not necessarily for the common people, although in the big cities, in the big towns, pretty much everyone knows a little bit of English. So the drive for translating things is not as important then? Unfortunately, it is, because at the level of speaking and discussing, English is used. And you have a webmaster, you have a person who runs a website?

31:33Not as a person which is specialized in that, as in any small institute, everyone does many things, so Tudor Smirna, the executive director who translated the book, the Sotos book, he's also the webmaster, and doing a great job at it. He was helped and is constantly helped by Ionella Munzu, another of our colleagues, which also knows these things, and she's also a Austrian scholar in Romania. I want to say something about Diana Kostia. She was here, was it three or four years ago, She was here in the 90s, at the end of the 90s, I guess.

32:27And she died of cancer. She died of cancer. And so may she rest in peace. Cancer, a couple of years ago. A living memory of all of us, yeah. But there are many new students that are coming along. Yes, colleagues from the university department where I teach, we are a group of Austrian I recall that Guido Holzmann visited once and he came back and he said, I think I've seen the future of Austrian economics and it's in Bucharest. I hope that might be true someday. Why not? He can exaggerate sometimes. All intellectuals are prone to exaggerate for once in a while, but let's hope there's a grain of truth in that. So colleagues, young professors, many of them are attracted to Austrian ideas, the students are attracted to the Austrian ideas, they come to our seminars at the Mises Institute, for instance in this small book, Small Books Great Ideas Seminars, a beginner level seminar which we started about three or four years ago and which is going quite well ever since.

33:47And they also, the ones who are more interested and have done a bit of reading come to this main seminar, the Mises seminar. And there is a constant flow of people, so to speak. Some of them go mind their own business afterward, but they are still in the general public favoring these ideas, so they have an impact, and a smaller part of them become assistant professors or professors. This is the main route, actually, if you want to study hard economics in Romania and still make a living, not a spectacular living, but support yourself on the intellectual front.

34:34The standard job is to get into the university and teach. Otherwise, if you start up a business or if you work in a bank or in some place else, you don't have time anymore to improve. So you just remain a fan of the ideas and a friend of the Institute, which is great. Yes, and a supporter. and you've come here this week you're only here for 10 days and you didn't come for this interview although it makes it worth it for the whole trip i know but for me but you're researching what i am here thanks to a project conducted by one of my colleagues in the department in the Academy of Economic Studies, a project on the topic of economic crisis and contagion.

35:32This is a very fashionable subject nowadays. And you're using our library and access to people and things. My part in the project is to present the Austrian version of things and therefore I was able to Fund Myself and come here to research. And your resources have been planned for you and the trip has gone well so far? Yes. And presumably this project will mean a website in which materials on this topic, economic crisis and contagion, will be available. We have to publish some papers, we have to present them in conferences and maybe even Paul Poun published a book at some point. The Professor Poun, Christian Poun, the one who is in charge of this project, is also, as of late, strongly leaning toward Austrian ideas.

36:25Yes. But it's been true all over the world. I mean, the fit between the Austrian theory and the existing crisis is just so close and so clear, even to people who have never heard of the Austrian theory. Even a short version of it, it sounds very convincing. It all of a sudden has become extremely relevant, unavoidably relevant, so to speak. Thank you so much, Vlad, for visiting us here at the Mises Institute. It's good to make this contact with our brothers and sisters in Bucharest at the Mises Institute Romania, which is Mises.ro. So everybody should go visit that and I hope you come back again. Thank you. Thank you very much both for this interview and for the chance of working here in this wonderful environment.

37:14Thank you very much.