Errors
“The Romanians have
lost the right
of doing unpunished mistakes”
Titu Maiorescu
1. Perennial errors (errors which were committed repeatedly through the years)
In
2. Critical errors committed
after December ’89
The electoral politic stimulated the economic crisis.
Among
the critical errors committed by the provisional government here are some
mistakes which aggravated the state of a wrong- dimensioned economy:
1.
the reduction of the
number of the working days per week when Romania needed badly work for the
reconstruction and the recovery of the economy after 45 years when
politics were more important than the
economy;
2.
the payment of the
wages even if they weren’t justified by the production;
3.
raising
the wages of certain categories of employees. Those raises weren’t based on the
growth of work’s productivity;
4.
returning the social
parts without ensuring a real surplus of merchandise on the market;
5.
spending the currency
reserves of the country on cigarettes, alcohol and other consumption or luxury
merchandise;
6.
the infiltration of F.S.N.’s organisations in industrial units, the dismissal
of the technical staff and the continuos intervention of the politicians in the
economy;
7.
employing
the professionals in politics, freeing the prisoners, even those who committed
crimes against the revolutionaries from December ’89, paying the P.C.R.
activists( see “Viata parlamentara”
number 1/ 1991 ).
The resorption of the crisis was mistakenly thought-out.
Both in the
programmes and in the practice of the government which came after December ’89
it was thought and taken action for the resorption of
the economical crisis by combining two factors: lowering the living standard
and the infusion of foreign capital.
This
“recipe” was mistakenly thought-out because a factor as important as both the
other two was omitted : the organisation of the
labour. The importance of those three factors could have been different
depending on the political view ( social-democrat,
liberal, modern etc…), even so such an
important factor as the organisation of the labour could not be missing. On
this wrong theoretical basis the government exacerbated the system and
structure crisis. The concrete elements of the programme for the resorption of the crisis were: reducing the number of
working days per week from six to five, the refusal to administrate the state’s
wealth, refusal generated by the confusion between the position of manager of a
society and the position of owner ( those ideas were
presented in the Deputy Chamber in November ’91 and published in the
syndicate’s paper “Realitatea” in May ‘92 ).
The depreciation of the national currency was looked at as a panacea.
In the circumstances that now Romania
consumes more than it produces, that the
intern production doesn’t ensure it’s own consumption of goods like cereals,
sugar, fodder, milk and others, the devaluation of the “leu”
in the hope of reaching a firm and durable rate of exchange is an illusion. An
illusion because the difference between consumption and production isn’t minor:
in 1991 the negative balance was of 50% and in 1992 of 38%. This leads us to
the conclusion that any stable exchange rate that will be artificially settled,
on an administrative way or by the exchange rate of the market, after a period
of time, by the action of the prices-wages spiral, it will be overtaken. This
simple truth wasn’t won by the post-Decembrist economic-financial executives,
which have been experiencing themselves the stabilisation of the “leu” by repeating devaluation, going on a range from 16 to
21, to 60, to 180 lei/$ etc. Today’s stability, July 1994, is chimerical, it is so due to the low living standard of the
whole society. The real stabilisation of the “leu”
can be obtained only if working at the essential causes: the volume of
production, the quality of production, the structure of production. And no one
worked at or cared about those essential causes.
Blocking
privatisation.
Releasing the certificates with shares before:
1) the Stock Exchange effectively started to function on the basis of the share
from the most important societies, 2) giving a quotation to the shares of the
societies proposed to be privatised and 3) setting the real value of the shares
made possible a real plunder. Blocking mass
privatisation was the corollary of unlawfulness.
Fatal legislative confusions
The
legislative confusion, from the first legislature of the Parliament, between
the position of owner and the one of manager, intensified the crisis that began
immediately after December 1989 when it should have stopped it ( the first notification of this
situation was made by Aurelian Dochia
in May 1992, in the Deputy Chamber; as a remedy the law of the management
contract, applied some time before in Czechoslovakia, was suggested).
The
solution to the resorption of the crisis must contain
all the three factors:
- the
organisation of labour (that includes going back to a 6 work days per week
system)
- to adjust the
living standard according to the productivity of labour
- the infusion of foreign capital in the productive domains of the economy.
3. Wrong approaches
Communism, in Romania, being rejected by the majority of the population and because there wasn’t a autochthonous communist party, communism was brought and installed in Romania by foreigners and with what was the worst, the lowest, the most anti-Romanian in our society. It doesn’t take to be a philosopher ( see L. B. - “Trilogia culturii”) to foresee the failure of social-communism in our country. It doesn’t take to be a sociologist to see the failure of the first wave of young people, well taught, very well in what concerns the theoretical side, but lacking in practice. It should be just as easy to see the failure of the second wave, of former communist functionaries, which as well as the first ones don’t have experience in what concerns production. They test on us, from their offices, different strategies. They are a bit more open-minded than their predecessors from before 1989, in the sense that when something goes wrong in the society, they apply the opposite solution. On the other hand the solutions waited by the society, for the resorption of the crisis and for raising the living standard (surviving standard), aren’t at a macroeconomic level but rather at a microeconomic one. As the preconceived idea that problems are exclusively at a macroeconomic level is supported by the mass-media it’s pretty hard to sustain the contrary. As our essential problems are the quality of the goods and of services, the efficiency of our products, the number of items produced, you get to the conclusion that essential is the act of technical and technological creation of a part of the industry, the act of giving it a new direction towards consumption and services. If this is the essence, then the REAL solutions are at a micro level, at the productive societies. And the people needed to solve the problems of the crisis in our country are the projecting engineers, generally the creators, the technicians and not the economists as today’s leaders suppose.
If the reader is willing, he will agree when ending of the book that some ideas, some examples given cannot come from economists or from pedagogues , but only from an cumulated experience in the place where the goods, added or spent by the social class above, are produced. If this transition period will last even for twenty years and the Romanians will choose their leaders as they have in these last years nothing will change, because the leaders don’t have the adequate solutions, they don’t have a past experience where to take them from, as all they have been doing was holding speeches. Those leaders, after 40 years of humbly serving the former form of government, will not be able of giving real solutions. Lastly, not our leaders are guilty, but the ones that empowered them rule. On the other hand the Romanian politic system provides the citizen no real alternative, practically the citizen doesn’t have what to choose and that’s why nearly 40% of the persons with the right to vote don’t go to vote and over 20% choose randomly a list. It’s not hard to see these things, it’s harder to forget the past, to find the political will for a real change. In this book I will go beyond the limits imposed to a hypothetical government co-responsibility, and there will be presented a direction to be followed in the future, foreseen by the author. More than that, it is suggested the changing of the constitution and of the penal code, beginning from the necessity of blocking and stopping the Mafia - type nets formed in the police, political parties and Justice.