“I would note some differences in the approaches of the older generations compared to the current ones. For example, the problem of debt repayment. Here again we will have to make a historical excursion. Between 1873 and 1914, it was normal and natural for every person to live within the confines of their own blanket. It was not accepted to live in debt. If an individual was in debt, he went to debt prison and sat there and worked until he paid off the debt,” said Valentyn Lazeya, chief economist of the National Bank.

On Wednesday, Lazea presented his book “The Moral History of Monetary and Fiscal Policy” at the headquarters of the BNR, about which His Eminence spoke at length in an interview with HotNews.ro. The opening speech belonged to Governor Iserescu.

As a “legal entity”, the company was subject to “unlimited liability”, so it was obliged to pay with all the wealth of the owner. If the owner’s wealth was not enough, he also went to prison, explains Lazeya.

As for the States, they built their budgets not with a deficit, as is done now, but with a surplus. The only exception when budget deficits were allowed were wars, says the chief economist. “But even when the war ended, during the next 20-30-40 years, a budget surplus was practiced in order to reduce the public debt created during the war,” explains Valentyn Lazeya.

There was a period when the rules became more relaxed; the individual was no longer in prison, the companies became limited liability companies

There followed an intervening period with the gold standard, when the rules were relaxed, the individual no longer went to jail, and companies became limitedly liable.

“And now, in the period of consumption that we are going through, all the rules related to living without debt have gone into the background. Everyone wants something NOW, or if you want it now, you can only get it by paying the debt,” the author of the book believes.

“States began to go into debt because the citizens, that is, the voters, pushed them into debt. Well, when you want to increase pensions, and there are not enough revenues in the budget, where to increase them? You raise them by performing duties. And so on, and so on, and so on. So I wouldn’t say that the States are spendthrifts, and that individuals care about them. On the contrary, people who are used to instant gratification live in debt, with a sense of entitlement they ask states and governors to offer them a way of life based on debt,” V. Lazea also believes.

Attitude to work and study.

Let’s see why the number of people who do not learn or do not want to learn has increased in the last 150 years. That it wasn’t always like that. In the first bourgeois period, in addition to the bourgeoisie, which advanced by its own merits or, so to speak, meritocratically, certain elements of the aristocratic way of life were preserved, that is, privileges inherited without any merit.

Well, in that period, as Piketty also writes in his book “The Capital of the 21st Century”, it made sense for a rational young man to marry a rich girl from a rich family, because he would earn more money from this marriage. than from work, engaged in trade.

Then came the First World War, which wiped out all the great fortunes, flattened or destroyed the aristocracy, and at that point everything reset. From this point on, work becomes a creator of wealth and value, and people know that they all begin as equals. And only the one who works harder will get further. What increased the role of education in the first place. Because no one wanted to work in factories, plants or mines. So the world began to pick up this book and learn, so that between 1905 and 1990, IQ actually increased worldwide.

After that comes the consumerist period of printing money out of ignorance, when you can earn money just by bending down on the street or wearing some clothes and showing them to some kids.

Attitude to economic crises

You will read about the attitude to economic crises in the book. Ups and downs were also accepted earlier. Currently, recessions of any kind are not acceptable, and upswings that are out of balance are even more stimulated by pro-cyclical policy, explains the chief economist of the BNR.

Historical view

What Valentin Lazeya says:

• This book is, if you will, a method of historical analysis. History, if we look at it, teaches us two completely opposite things that collide head-on. On the one hand, history teaches us that human emotions have been the same for 3,000 years. Fears, love, pride, all human feelings have not changed in the last 3000 years.

• On the other hand, all history shows us that ideas, that is, not feelings and emotions, but ideas change very often, as new technological, social, cultural, family, etc. changes appear.

• And I want to give you a practical example of the incorrect application of the historical method, which affects even our lives now. The esoteric method requires the following: to judge people and their actions in the light of the beliefs and ideas prevalent at the time. So don’t judge people, say, 200 years ago in light of the ideas of the present time and vice versa, don’t force people today to judge by the criteria of 200 years ago.

• Or, if you look at the debate between the American left and the American right, they make this very mistake. The American left says, sir, the people who made the constitution of America were also slave owners. So let’s tear down their statues because by our moral standards today, they were scoundrels. They do not look at the fact that at a time when there were no machines with mechanical power, slavery was the cheapest method of production. So you can’t judge America’s founding fathers by today’s criteria that they were slave owners.

• The American right does exactly the opposite. And I’ll be reading Ben Shapiro, whose book just came out. He’s a young neocon in his early 40s and his book is called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.

• And he says there, Sir, we must apply in America today exactly what the founding fathers thought in 1780. That is, that a person should have the right to life and liberty and that his property should not be violated. That means, he says, the right to bear arms must be guaranteed, because the fathers of the Constitution never said we don’t have that right. So he wants people today to apply the ideas of those who lived in 1780.

• It is this misunderstanding of the historical method that causes people today to think with the heads of those who were in 1780, and vice versa, which is why this clash of cultures takes on paranoid forms in America.

“For the last 50 years, we have been living in conditions of consumer morality. The kind in which the generations born after 1970 don’t even know anything else, because they think the world started with them. And in fact, this book is intended for young people, not for those who are 40, 50, 60 years old, but it is intended for young people to wake up to reality,” said Valentin Lazea, according to Agerpres.

In the review of the book by the chief economist of the BNR, Lucian Angel, several paragraphs were selected with ideas that are absent from public discussion, says Angel, although they are very relevant to our time.

• “After the 1990s, citizens of developed countries lived under a triple illusion: that hard-earned education was no longer needed thanks to the Internet, that peace was guaranteed forever with the disappearance of competing ideological blocs, and that central banks could solve any economic crisis. , without any sacrifices on the part of governments or the population. It is fair to say that these generations were the most pampered in the history of monitoring. And when this condescension reached its limit, the dissatisfied public began to look for the culprits outside themselves.

• Some politicians do not take well to the newfound independence of central banks. There is a possibility of conflict between ministries of finance, supporters of a soft fiscal policy, and central banks, supporters of a tight monetary policy. The future will show us whether there will be enough wisdom for a compromise and whether it is possible to reconcile clearly conflicting policies,” Mr. Summarizes very diplomatically. Lazea, explains Lucian Angel.