EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
For the liberal-minded person, the protests against the Oresharski cabinet may be a reason for (rather) cautious optimism. The good thing about extremely brazen political actions is that they manage to illustrate the essence of the state for absolutely everyone with one grotesque example much better than countless articles and books on the subject.
Thanks to the recent hyperinflation, for example, it became clear to the entire Bulgarian society that printing money is nothing more than a redistribution of wealth in favor of individuals connected to power, at the expense of everyone else.
It is hard to imagine a politician whose program includes massive inflation reaping much electoral success at the moment. And if we continue to search for the “positive” in this catastrophe, we can mention the subsequent introduction of the currency board, which, although far from an optimal monetary order, at least seriously limited the power of the (Bulgarian) bureaucracy over the money supply. Taking away the right of the BNB to monetize government debt certainly saved us from numerous populist measures and grandiose state projects.
The election of Delyan Peevski as director of the National Security Agency also only demonstrates in an obvious way the crony capitalism that has been spreading for a long time, in which the path between government-affiliated corporations and the power itself is not only conceivable, but also the most logical. Such steps by the political class, together with the failed lustration, only fuel doubts that people associated with the totalitarian secret services continue to have a decisive influence on the lives of all of us.
And as we have written more than once, the problem is rooted not in the specific person, but in the system, which by definition creates conflicts of interest, because the bureaucracy does not work with its own money and does not bear material responsibility for its meaningful spending. There are certainly far more tolerable options for the post in question (as well as for all other posts in the administration), but Peevski's resignation will not change anything significant in the vicious entanglement of interests. The demands for new elections are also understandable, but the option of a moral person coming to power to "fix" Bulgaria has already been played out several times in recent history, with not particularly impressive results.
It is naive to expect that through personnel changes, rather than through cuts in state structures, a tangible improvement in the economic situation will be achieved. However, one of the most persistent statist myths claims precisely this – that economic progress is a function of the state apparatus, or that the latter is needed to create the general framework. Observing the glaring failures in the state-monopolized sectors of public life, it is difficult to see why anyone would want more state in their lives, except for people directly dependent on transfer payments and companies that enjoy state protections and privileges.
Therefore, the efforts of free-thinking people should be directed not so much towards changing the ruling elite, but rather towards limiting the power of the repressive apparatus over our lives. Only in this way will the political process be put into perspective, which will save a lot of public and personal energy wasted in struggles to redistribute production instead of increasing it. Cutting state power will also “deprive” us of such public goods as the offensively paternalistic initiatives to prescribe what and how we have the right to consume (for our own good), the regulations of privacy, and the invasion of personal space through wiretapping and monitoring of correspondence.
