About the responsibility of the State

We have recently been informed that the current President of Romania is of the opinion that the State is not responsible for every single citizen. Therefore, the current authorities indicate, through their most authoritative voice, that they feel no inkling of responsibility for some of us. In that case, we, the citizens, would have a strong suggestion for them: go tax only those for whom you feel responsible, your in-laws, your chums, your feasting buddies!

The State is – and ought to be – responsible before each and every citizen, because it demanded, demands or will, at a certain moment, demand money from each and every citizen. Eliminate from the equation the thesis of the government’s responsibility and all you end up with is a thug demanding protection money, nothing more and nothing less.

The idea that the current President attempts to credit, namely that the responsible state is quite simply the communist state betrays either stupidity or sheer malice.

It betrays stupidity if he sincerely believes that the Right is a political philosophy whose purpose in life is to further the interests of a closed group, namely the clique in power at a certain moment. This is not the Right, this is the Mob thinking.

People with genuine Right-leaning views are preoccupied with the fates of all citizens and, because they feel responsible to increase the level of prosperity of each, they strive to ensure a business environment that is friendly to all investors, be they large or small, so that the end result is a free, competition-driven market, on all levels, including job market. Nothing rises salaries more efficiently and more durably than a healthy, robust business environment, in which the competent individual has (and is perfectly aware of having) the possibility of leaving one employer for another. Thus, the current employer will try to motivate him to stay; the prospective employer will try to motivate him to come. The competition between them will ensure a better salary and better working conditions. In short – greater prosperity for the employee, whether as a bank manager or as a salesperson at a till.

On the other hand, the President demonstrates moral baseness if, behind the beautiful curtain of a few words claiming to illustrate Right-leaning ideas, all he does is consolidate the position of his own clique. If Basescu’s state is not concerned with all citizens, then we must understand that Basescu’s state is concerned only with a select few, like, for argument’s sake, with citizen Basescu himself. It is for him that the Government has allotted for 2011 a budget fatter by about one million RON than the previous budget, which in turn was substantially fatter than the 2009 budget, which, you guessed it, was substantially fatter than the 2008 budget. A policy of savage austerity did our government display, but only when it comes to state employees, pensioners, mothers with children, not when it comes to El Presidente. Truly, a Right-leaning policy, for, naturally, all the arithmetic is done by Mr. Basescu’s right-hand man, Prime Minister (I was just about to write Prime Straw Man) Emil Boc.

Cartoon by Ian Baker, published here

We see how the wealth of this nation begins to be concentrated in the hands of a closed group, in the immediate vicinity of Government and enjoying a symbiotic relation with it. And this is not and cannot be a Liberal ideal, for such a position naturally engenders monopolies and cancels out the fundamental principle of market freedom and transparent competition. It is, therefore, imperative that this clique should leave the political scene as soon as possible and take its hands out of our pockets.

Welcome!

I say about myself that I am a historian of Antiquity. I love it not because it deals with great men long dead, but because it deals with us, with those who populate the Earth at this very moment. It is enough to read just a few lines of Thucydides, Sallust or Tacitus to see emerging from the page people who even now are working – or plotting – to influence our lives. I will try, throughout this blog, to see if there is anything History may still teach us (and I believe there is, or else this blog would not have existed).