“For two years, central banks practiced positive real interest rates. That will turn the life of debtors into hell. The point is this: stop hoping that your standard of living will rise, you are already living far beyond your means. Reuse things, repair them, sort plastic, use public transport more, stop traveling by plane and by train,” said Valentyn Lazea on Andrea Roshka’s “Big and Interesting” podcast.

The discussion took place on the occasion of the presentation of the book “Moral History of Monetary and Fiscal Policy”, and the dialogue touched on the topics

sensitivities like progressive taxation, the risk of being taught that third world populations would become dominant, and reincarnation and how living off debt was a very risky business before 1914

What the Chief Economist of the BNR said in Andrea Roshka’s podcast

• Younger generations imagine that credit has always existed. Credit, living in debt was a very risky business before 1914 and very isolated. Yes, living in debt was an exception. As an American worker, it was really embarrassing to take out a loan. After that I started the first early forms. Ford and the early car manufacturers, because cars were expensive, they gave out loans to people they knew very well to get their cars. After that, the so-called revolving credit appeared. Large American chain stores said: we know these customers, so we give them the opportunity to buy products from us. They were purely custom items.

• In 1958, Bank of America, the bank of Italian immigrants, comes along and says: let’s depersonalize this relationship, let’s introduce a credit card that will work first in the state of California and then in the entire United States. America. And this impersonal relationship began… After that, the level of acceptance of the documents on the basis of which you took a loan began to be more and more softened, but in the rush to give out as much money as possible, as well as the controlled political factor, it ended with the fact that he given to everyone including NINJA people (no income, no job or assets)

• Everything is wrong in the world education system. Religious teachings were forgotten. Yes, the Decalogue that says do not lie, do not steal…

• Full-fledged democracies are reduced to the rank of imperfect, because populism begins, an uneducated public imposes its point of view, and politicians give it satisfaction. And imperfect democracies turn into authoritarian regimes. Because the public, dissatisfied with the way democracy works, although it should be primarily dissatisfied with itself, goes to extreme solutions, which also applies to Europe and Romania. I mean, there are many who say, even though they have a full refrigerator today: we are tired of this democracy. We no longer like what we see.

• During war, a nation is united by the fact that both the rich and the poor shed their blood on the battlefield. Likewise it collapses in times of peace, which collapses the nation, when the rich pay more than proportionately, hence gradually.

• And then the poor person can say, “Yes, look, this person may have made money by fraud, but at least I can see that they are contributing proportionately more than I, who may have been disadvantaged in life, may have been unlucky, …

• Progressive taxation creates national solidity, a concept that is completely absent in Romania. Nobody cares about him.

• The consequences of global warming are felt more and more every year. Yes, 2023 became the hottest year in history. The year is 2024, so far the hottest January and February in history. Part of the third world countries are competing for the supremacy of the West in this war in Ukraine. They are more on the side of Russia than on the side of the West. Therefore, there is a desire to undermine the primacy of the West. Or these countries – I mainly mean China, Indonesia – are characterized by the fact that there is no “It depends on me” mentality. There, students grind their teeth and study books very seriously. So those who use drugs or play computer games or whatever over there have competition from hungry young people who are studying, who have put their stomachs on books and so on. And who in this competition between the East and the West I do not like the West. So, unless some determined people and more book science from the third world wake up again and win.

• A person on the street or a person watching us may ask: why should I be guided by morality, concepts of Good, Beautiful and Truth? When it is clear that everyone is guided by utilitarian morality, everyone stands on the shoulders of the other. The basic, fundamental question that I ask not in the book, yes, I ask it here in the show, is this: Is this universe that we live in, is it not also governed by universal laws? – Truth, Beauty, Goodness and. I have d? And here are two different ideas that a person can have. Every person perceives the universe as a place of danger: today you are fine, tomorrow you are sick, tomorrow you can be hit by a car. In this case, it makes sense to be utilitarian, that is, to enjoy life as much as possible, to satisfy oneself, etc.

• Or another option, if the universe is an orderly place where there are laws of reward, karma, where good will be rewarded with good and the evil you do will eventually be rewarded with evil. I think there is evidence in favor of this second concept. Scientific evidence.

• Even if it wasn’t always like that. Science is the first to lead to the desacralization of the universe since the 18th century. Laplace, when asked by Napoleon whether he needed God to explain the movements of the heavens, said that he did not need this “hypothesis”. A big problem arises in the 20th century when Einstein discovers the theory of relativity. Yes, when he says that time is not absolute, but depends on the position of the observer. Space is not absolute, and at this point everyone is saying, well, if neither time nor space is absolute, then leave us alone with God and all that. And the big trouble is that the theory of relativity, which is a scientific concept, was perceived by many as a theory of relativism, including moral relativism.

• From that moment on, art ceased to be what it was before. Artists stopped doing art because they started all kinds of experiments. Minimalist music, painting without a picture, but only with colored spots, they say, if everything is relative, then it depends only on the individual taste of everyone. I mean shit, and I mean what I say! Likewise in the social sciences, in all the social sciences, sir, there are no clear concepts anymore. Foucault came along and said that “words have the value attributed to them by the individual, they do not represent concepts as such.” If a white man utters a sentence, he expresses class dominance. If a black person says the same sentence, they express a position of submission. ..Complete madness came at the moment when you lost all your bearings.

• During the war, states increased their debts. But as soon as the war ended, everything possible was done to reduce the debt. Because of the primary surplus, that is, because of budget revenues that exceed budget expenditures, and not for a year, two, three, but for the whole decade. And the public accepted it, because they knew that the strength of the economy is based on so-called, that is, solid, real finances. And poor countries could not go into debt again because, as happened to Egypt around 1885, they risked being occupied by the armies of creditor powers, in this case England, because of unpaid debts.

• When asked how God accepts wars, Lazea replied: “We must move away from the Christian religion in any of its Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant forms and go to a more global meaning of religion, to Eastern religions that have not excluded from their content the concept of reincarnation . Reincarnation originally existed even in the Gospels, in the Bible, but it was erased. All the passages related to reincarnation were deleted at the first Council of Nicaea in 325, because then the priests said: “Lord, if the common man knew that he had I don’t know how many lives to improve, he would be lazy . and lazy? Sir, let’s just postpone reincarnation to the end of time when there will be the 2nd coming and then they will all be reincarnated into human bodies. Or if you delete the concept of reincarnation from religion, as unfortunately was done in Christianity, then you no longer understand why a child has cancer, why a man treats a woman badly. The moment you accept the concept of reincarnation, life becomes simple, everything, everything becomes clear, and the burden is lifted from your soul, everything becomes clear. It is also clear why baby X died and why that woman was tortured and why this man was left without arms and legs and more than half the population of the earth lives in evil, in religions that still believe in reincarnation.

• After the elimination of the gold standard, money became an expression of a very physical, concrete thing. After the abolition of the gold standard, money gained greater intrinsic value. This is what economists call the money illusion. When an ignorant common man thinks that if he has more money in his pocket, he will become richer. Which is not true, especially if inflation is running parallel or faster than the money supply. In the era of sound money, people knew very clearly that you will not get richer if you get money that is not related to productivity. If your productivity goes down and you get more money, you don’t get richer, you get poorer because inflation will come and take it away.

• Politicians are betting on such ignorance of the economy by the general public. All economists know that the illusion of money is a tool to manipulate the masses by telling them we’ll give you some more money. And people say hate live, but they don’t think that maybe they don’t have the performance improvement to justify the money. No one thinks about this, and hence the whole chain of weaknesses we are talking about: populism, threats to democracy…