The author is a prominent Georgian businessman (Bloomberg), a traditionalist conservative philanthropist, and an activist of traditional family values. Although from the country of Georgia, he made his fortune in Russia, building one of the largest insurance companies in Russia (ROSNO). This is an excerpt from a speech he gave at the anti-globalization conference in Moldova in May 2017. He is a fierce critic of globalism.
We are gathered here today to talk about one of the most boring subjects in the world, which is economics and finance.
I also join this unfortunate crowd of ours, but I think it is necessary. We prefer to talk about theology, philosophy, ideology, and we tend to pave the way for what needs to be done. Because we are by now a quarter of a century in the monopoly of liberalism, and I think that today we have already said what we don’t like, what we don’t want, and it’s time to try to formulate what we want, …
… I came to the conclusion about the harsh reality, since the territories of the defeated geopolitical camp, we were deliberately deliberately victors. This school of my thought is viewed as a derogatory "conspiracy theory" and is ridiculed. We are told that nobody wants us to be poor. The richer we are, the more goods and services can be sold to us. True, if the task of geopolitical domination and subordination was completed.
But I believe that until - God forbid - Russia is destroyed, or Russia itself is dissolved, this task remains largely unattainable, and therefore our artificial poverty is an excellent tool for our subordination and manipulation.
The author with his wife in Georgia in 2017
How is this artificial poverty achieved?
Let's start with the constitutions written by Western advisers for all former Soviet countries.
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In fact, we know that they are all really unofficial satellites of the US Federal Reserve Bank, which, in turn, are not accountable to the American state, but rather to its private owners and monopolize the printing of the dollar.
These national central banks, while proclaimed different, despite the declared hostility among some of these states, pursue dual strategies that can be summarized in two ways:
1.high lending rates
2. Unbelievably low money supply
Both of these dogmas are proclaimed based on monetary theories and the works of Milton Friedman. However, even this is a lie, because if we take a closer look at Friedman's work, we see that he recognizes the relationship between the level of the central bank lending rate and the rate of inflation. But this dependence is much less than we are told. Friedman believes that in developed countries this correlation may appear in four to five months. And he writes that this time lag is even greater in countries like ours.
Now let's take a look at our reality. Some of our Western friends may have noticed that although you have enjoyed record low lending rates over the past 10 or 15 years, unprecedented in the world - most lending rates were 0-1 percent - we have to bear high lending rates 7 -10 percent, killing our business and killing the purchasing power of our population.
When the inflationary myth is insufficient, liberal propaganda takes refuge in another argument: they tell us that central bank rates must be very high to attract foreign investment to our countries. Also a lie. If you look at the dynamics of capital outflow, capital export, for example, from a country like Russia, you will see astronomical figures of about two trillion dollars that were shifted from Russia after the collapse of the USSR, more than were attracted to Russia. So this argument is also false.
Now let's - be really boring - look at the money supply measured by boring economic ratios like M1, M2, or M3. It does not matter. You will see a dramatic difference depending on the setting and country. In developed countries, these ratios ranged from 100 to 200 percent of GDP, while in the countries of the former Soviet Union, they are very low, weighing 20-40 percent.
Not to mention the fact that even despite these measures, inflation in the countries of the former Soviet Union today significantly exceeded its Western peers.
No one denies the theoretical correlation between these factors, but the lies are in the details.
Looking back at our post-Soviet history, all our countries; Russia, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine have gone through terrible shocking periods of hyper inflation. This was done to us when the Soviet Union had already collapsed and was under the control of Western advisers. I believe this was the first act of a two-step manipulation to scare us to death in the 1990s with inflation, in order to prepare public opinion for any inflation. To counter the next harmful tight monetary policy, artificially restrain our economy.
Therefore, every time someone wants to increase the money supply, we are afraid, and we remember the 90s, and we say: do not touch him, let's continue to be poor.
Based on the above, when we think of an alternative post-liberal paradigm, we should ask ourselves the following first question: perhaps, if left truly free, the liberal economic paradigm is really productive, and we should not do anything other than freeing it from hegemony of the Federal Reserve System. Perhaps this is all we have to do and the rest will arrange it themselves. I am personally against this school of thought, because, in principle, the idea of capture of the liberal economic paradigm by its authors and its effective use without them seems absurd.
In my opinion, we need to rethink what is “Post-liberal economic harmony”, which, by the way, sounds like “PLEH”, ironically speaking as the opposite of HELP.
My time frame does not allow me to discuss lengthy pros and cons. Therefore, I will give my preliminary views on the subjects, recognizing that I did not come here with too many preconceived notions and that I, like any of us, must remain open and flexible in this new discussion.
Q1. Should there be private property in PLEH?
A1. Absolutely yes, anything else would mean a repetition of the tragedy of Marxism.
Q2. Should there be private property in every industry in PLEH?
A2. Each country should have the right to decide for itself. Any standardization would mean repeating the insidious dual standards of liberalism. For one country, water is a strategic resource, while for another, it is education. Each state should be free of its choice and regardless of pseudo-universal standards.
Q3. Should there be an institution of central banks, and if so, should they be independent from their states?
A3. If we remove our function of reporting to foreign Fed, they can easily be merged into local treasuries or even finance ministries.
Q4. Should economic policy be free of ideology?
A4. For starters, there is no such thing as freedom from ideology. The current liberal economic paradigm has an ideology of profit at its center, therefore, it is not free of ideology by definition. The PLEH paradigm should serve what is central to every state: family values, nation, etc.
Q5. What should be the main form of loan allowed in PLEH, usury or participation?
A5. Participation is preferred.
Q6. Should there be provisions for cross-border capital mobility?
A6. Yes, according to each state.
Q7. Fiat currency or secured currency?
A7. Basically, up to each state, but the fiat currency is more realistic.
Q8. Labor legislation?
A8. Represent and build on the priorities of each country.
To summarize, the fundamental conservative revolution of the PLEH, as seen from today's point of view, is the proposal to abolish usury and abolish the monetary policy of states from the Fed.
Needless to say, all of the above is very crude and preliminary, but we have to start somewhere. The invention of PLEH is tantamount to the writing of music by the deaf, and if Beethoven had the chance, it would have been possible thanks to his phenomenal memory, a memory that we must seek answers in our respective pre-modern modern societies.
Thanks for your attention!
