Ukraine

Escape from Horodok

Published in the November 6, 2011 issue of the Ukrainian Weekly:

On Sunday, I took the marshutka to Horodok again to spend time with Aunt Stefa’s family. I didn’t want them picking me up at the bus station when I could walk, so this time, I went early, walked through town, and didn’t give them a call until I passed the train tracks.

I was determined to go home that evening, for once to resist their insistence that I spend the night. I simply wanted to do some work that night, as well as some laundry for tomorrow. They first asked about my evening plans as I removed my jacket. “Tonight I’ll go home,” I said. “Nooooo way. You can stay here.”

“I think tonight I’ll go home,” I repeated. “Don’t be silly,” they said.

During lunch they asked me again, and again when we loaded the car to drive to a different relative who’d just had a son.

Each time, I told them I was going home, and each time they acted like it was the most outrageous thing in the world. I didn’t argue, but my resolve grew.

We ate, drank, and skyped with my mother in New York before piling into Liubomyr’s car, presumably to drive back to Aunt Maria’s, who’d joined us at dinner, then to Aunt Stefa’s. I asked him to drop me off at the bus station, and everybody — Aunt Stefa, Aunt Maria, my two nieces, my cousin — reacted with horror and surprise, as if I hadn’t been telling them I was going home since the minute of my arrival.

“I wanted to give you marmalane,” Aunt Stefa said. “and pickles, mushroom preserves, verenyky.”

“Next time,” I said.

“Andri” — her son-in-law — “can drive you home in the morning,” she said for the fifth or six time. Andri was a taxi driver and had driven me back to L’viv in the past.

“I want to do some work,” I said.

“You have to come to our place, the marshutky aren’t running any more,” Aunt Stefa said, her voice slightly defiant. For a moment, she thought she’d won.

“They run until ten. I have another hour.” (I had checked.)

“Liubomyr, seriously, drop me off at the bus station,” I said.

“Noooo,” everybody shouted. My nieces said something about her English homework which I usually help her with when I visit.

I did my best to keep my voice pleasant, but firm. I love these people. “I’m not going to argue, but I am going to go home tonight,” I said. My third cousin laughed a little, for which I was happy. I felt like was murdering the pet hamster they’re all so excited about.

“Drop me off here,” I said as we passed the bus station.

“Noooo,” everybody screamed again.

“Are you crazy?” Aunt Stefa said. “It’s late. You’ll sleep at our place.”

“If you don’t drop me off, I’ll have much farther to walk,” I told Liubomyr.

“You can’t do it this way,” Aunt Maria chimed in, her voice sounding reasonable. “You can sleep at my place.” In the past, Aunt Maria and Aunt Stefa had both made me swear to spend the night at their place on the same night. They don’t argue between themselves, but they argue with me, and make me answer why I didn’t come to one or the other. It’s flattering but exhausting.

As the bus station vanished behind us, Aunt Stefa quietly explained to everybody how I would spend the evening at her place. “We’ll have tea, you can play cards . . . ”

“And you’ll help with my English homework,” said my ever-enthusiastic niece.

“. . . we’ll fold out the divan like we always do, and in the morning I’ll give you some food and Andri will drive you home.”

I had made a point of sitting near the door when we loaded the car. So when Liubomyr stopped near Aunt Maria’s to let her out, I made a quick exit from the car, my niece’s little hands too slow and too feeble to restrain me.

“Where in the world are you going?” said Aunt Stefa with genuine surprise, as if I hadn’t spent the last half hour, as well as most of the day, telling them.

Everybody got out and stood on the narrow, snow-covered street, by Aunt Maria’s gate. They looked to be in utter shock, and I was quick to take advantage of the confusion. I kissed each one of their stunned faced, thanking them for the wonderful evening and telling them how much I enjoy their company. I got through all of them before the shock wore off.

“You can’t,” pleaded Aunt Stefa. Each of my nieces, Aunt Stefa’s granddaughters, grabbed one of my hands and pulled me. I was prepared for a physical struggle. I have a few years of experience in brazilian jiu jitsu and blue belt. I felt confident I could out grapple my relatives and get away without anyone being injured.

“When I was in the army, forty paratroopers used to listen to me,” I said.

Liubomyr, who stood by his car door watched and laughed.

I was preparing to break the grips of my nieces, but Aunt Stefa, finally revealing a limit to her insistence, told them to stop because it wasn’t polite.

“Why do you want to go?” Aunt Maria said.

For the ninth or tenth time I told them I had a lot of work to do, and that I work better when I wake up in my own bed. Also that I needed to do some laundry for tomorrow.

They talked about darkness, Aunt Stefa’s marmalade, crime, and the possibility of Andri driving me home in the morning, but I could tell I was finally wearing them down. Their pleas lacked the vigor of the earlier ones.

I asked whether I was walking to the bus station or getting a ride. Liubomyr said, “let’s go.”

I kissed them all once again. Now their faces looked like I really did murder their hamster. Liubomyr turned skillfully on the shoulderless, snowy road, and I waved goodbye through the window. Only one of my nieces waved back.

—

In the evening, Aunt Stefa called and sounded surprised that I’d gotten home so quickly. She asked if I was angry. “Of course not,” I said. She asked why I wanted to leave, and I told her that I have a lot of work and feel scared that I might not finish. She told me Andri would bring me the bag of food tomorrow in his taxi, and I said it wasn’t worth it.

She started pleading again. I wanted to get to my laundry, so I acquiesced. He would drop it off in the evening.

After lecturing to a friend’s economics class about traditions of economic liberty in the U.S. vs. Ukraine, I hurried home and made it just at seven. At nine, Aunt Stefa called and told me Andri couldn’t make it.

Andri is a very angry guy, and I had a suspicious he’d consider that bag of food as excessive a gesture as I did. He’s much more insistent, though, and quick to shout. I can’t help but try to be polite, especially to people expressing such profound hospitality and concern.

That evening’s insistence was out of character for me, but I wanted to assert my independence to these relatives who I’ve known for less than two years. Perhaps that’s why it had an effect on me, and why I want to write about it.

—

Aunt Stefa called me the next morning and told me to meet her at L’viv’s bus station tomorrow.

“I’ll bring the food and give it to you, then take the marshutka back.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Aunt Stefa,” I said. “Thank you, but it’s not worth it.”

“Of course it is!” she said.

“I’ll get it next time. I don’t want you to spend two hours on the marshutka just to bring me food. You’re food is good, but it’s not worth it.”

“When next time? I’ll bring it to the bus station and hand it to you.”

I’m much better at winning these battles when I’m prepared. When I enter the situation knowing from the start what I need to do. Also, in English, I’m much, much better at the delicate art of polite rejection. In Ukrainian, I only manage to piece together crude expressions — “the food is good, but no thank you,” for example. Also, (my last excuse) she called me when I was still in bed. I folded.

“At least come over for coffee,” I said.

“Good,” she said. I sensed her mind already made intricate calculations concerning marshutky, busses, hours, glass jars, money. It seems to be a very elaborate challenge which she enjoyed.

As we agreed, she called me a third time that afternoon to arrange details.

“I’m going to come with Liuba [my cousin]. We can go to the museum where Andri [a different Andri, her son] is working [as a guard]. He’ll give us a tour.”

“Wonderful,” I said.

“You’re not too busy?”

“No,” I lied.

“What time is good for you?” she asked.

“I’m busy, but my time is flexible. What time is good for you?” I said.

“Any time. Just tell us when.”

“Six.”

She paused. “I can’t make six. I thought we’d drop the kids off at school and then go.”

“What time is that?”

“Any time. What suits you?” She asked again.

I guessed, then guessed again. When my guess, 1pm, was close enough, she suggested 2pm, and told me she’d call when she left Horodok. “If that’s okay with you,” she added.

Finding the Birthplace of Ludwig von Mises

by Mykola Bunyk and Roman Skaskiw

The problem of determining the house in which the famous economist and liberal thinker was born acquired urgency several months ago with an initiative by Ukraine’s small Austrolibertarian community to unveil a memorial plaque this September for the 130th anniversary of Ludwig von Mises’s birth.

The initial relevant information about the Mises family concerned Ludwig’s great-grandfather Ludwig Mayer Rachmiel Mises. According to the website of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv, Ludwig’s great grandfather Mayer Rachmiel owned buildings on Market Square 18 and Old Jewish Street 7 (Rynok Square 18 and Starojevreis’ka 7), two prominent addresses in the center of Lviv connected by a courtyard.

(Read more from mises.org)

Property Rights and Ukrainian Identity

I gave this lecture on April 19th, 2011.

Property Rights and Ukrainian Identity Lecture

Property Rights and Ukrainian Identity:

http://romaninukraine.com/Stuff/RomanSkaskiw_PropertyRightsNUkrainianIdentity.mp3

– In the lecture I make the case against coercive means to support the Ukrainian culture and language. I made two points afterwards which strengthened and elaborated on my case. Firstly, that coercive institution can easily be turned against Ukrainian culture and language. This is already happened through the policies of Ukraine’s Russophile education minister. Secondly, that people interested in supporting the Ukrainian culture and language should do as I do, and voluntarily donate money to cultural organizations. Even more importantly, people should vote with their wallets, and buy embroideries, museum and theater tickets, they should patronize nightclubs which play the type of music they like, and so on — your patronage supports exactly the aspects of Ukrainian culture which you find important.

– I also made a reference to two forces likely supporting the hryvnias peg to the U.S. dollar, but I only mentioned one, the IMF. The second is the power and influence of the country’s biggest oligarchs, who are all exporters. Exporters benefit in the short run from a weakening currency, as I discuss in this essay.

– I misspoke. On the wall hung Taras Shevchenko’s portrait, not photo.

Q & A:

http://romaninukraine.com/Stuff/RomanSkaskiw_PropertyRightsNUkrainianIdentity-QnA.mp3

– If my goal was to convince conference attendees that a more libertarian respect for property rights ensures a better future for all, then perhaps I committed a tactical mistake. I should have stuck to the more conventional position of advocating more regional autonomy and local self-governance, but I was asked what system I support. I mentioned privatizing security and with that, we all jumped head first into the deep end of the anarcho-capitalist swimming pool. I did the best I could, working from memory.

– I misspoke at one point, saying Iowa instead of Hawaii. The political scientist who calculated that over 100 million people (172 million, actually) were killed by their own governments during peace time, was the University of Hawaii’s Rudolph Rummel. There is also the KGB admission during Glasnost that 43 million Soviet citizens were killed, another estimate that 60 million Soviet citizens were killed, and Little Black Book of Communism which calculates that over 100 million people were killed by Socialist governments.

Economic Outlook

This was publish in Media Star’s newspaper and elsewhere.

here.

***

It is difficult to contemplate the enormous extent to which the world changed when the Soviet Union collapsed. The more economists and historians study the Soviet Union, the more apparent it becomes that it existed as a house of card built upon economic fallacies and that its collapse was inevitable.

We should remember, however, that the economic fraud of Soviet central planning is not only known historically, in retrospect. It was predicted before it happened. Based strictly on a theoretical understanding of human action, in other words, of economics, the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union was apparent to L’viv-born, Austrian School Economist, Ludwig Von Mises.

In 1921, before Lenin was even forced to restored partial property rights through his New Economic Policy (Novaya Ekonomicheskaya Politika ), Mises criticized central planning in a book entitled “Socialism.” He predicted not only that the Soviet Union’s collapse, but that it would eventually have many factories and empty stores. His reasoning was simple: without market prices, society is blind to its true desires.

We are now facing a second collapse which may alter the world as much as the collapse of the Soviet Union did — the collapse of the dollar. Using a similar theoretical understanding of human action, economists of the Austrian School unanimously predict the dollar’s collapse. The reason is also simple and should be self-evident: the United States government cannot stop printing money.

The intellectual work of the Austrian School is largely devoted to unmasking the many euphemisms the government and its apologists use to conceal this fact: economic stimulus, quantitative easing, liquidity traps.

The exact date of the dollar’s collapse is not only unknown, but unknowable. As Mises noted, an objective way of determining the date of a significant economic event cannot exist because the knowledge itself would change the date of the event.

For example, if we could determine that the dollar was going to lose half its purchasing power on Friday, this would cause people to spend dollars as quickly as possible on Thursday, changing the date of the collapse. Theoretically, however, it is clear that the United States government will be forced to chose between destroying the dollar and defaulting on its debt, and default appears out of the question.

It is very likely that the hryvnia will collapse along with the dollar. The price increases plaguing Ukraine are at least partially (perhaps totally) attributable to the country’s monetary policy. By keeping a fixed exchange rate between hryvnias and dollars, Ukraine’s central bank imports inflation from the United States.

There are probably two reasons for this monetary policy. First, Ukraine’s government is dependent upon IMF loans to avoid it’s own long-overdue default. The IMF promotes dollar-friendly policies. The more inflation gets exported to other countries, the longer the collapse of the dollar can be delayed, and the further the gravy-train of printed money can carry the vast bureaucracies of government. (In the United States, one of out six people works for government.) It is likely that the IMF pressures Ukrainian monetary policy.

Secondly, large industries which export their products benefit in the short term from a devalued currency, and many of Ukraine’s most influential people are industrialists who rely on exports. They may also be pressuring the Central Bank of Ukraine to import inflation from the United States. It is important to remember, however, that they only benefit in the short term. In the long term, all of society suffers under the skyrocketing prices and the chaos they create.

The question remains, what to do about this?

For individuals, both dollars and hryvnias should be treated like the hot potato in the similarly named children’s game. Do not get caught holding a large amount of dollars or hryvnias when the music stops. People who have worked hard and lived modestly and want to preserve the value of their savings for the distant future should find ways of doing so that do not involve keeping large quantities of currency.

For society, we should distinguish between what Austrian School economist F.A. Hayek called the voluntary, private-sector economy and the coercive, public sector economy. He called the public sector economy coercive because it runs on taxes which are collected by force.

After the collapse of the dollar, the voluntary sector of the economy will go through a difficult time as it finds a new medium of exchange. Where currencies have collapsed, cigarettes, cows, flour, and bottled water have served as temporary mediums of exchange. Gold have silver almost always emerge as the voluntary choice when a society isn’t forced to use its government’s currency.

The private sector will recover naturally and peacefully because people will still want all the goods and services it produces — food, clothing, entertainment, books, technology, travel. Those businesses who fail to produce goods and service which others want at prices they are willing to pay will go bankrupt, and their land, labor and capital goods will eventually be incorporated into more productive enterprises.

By contrast, the coercive sector of the economy will recover neither naturally nor peacefully because it doesn’t produce goods and services which people voluntarily consume. They run on money which is collected by force or printed. Look for the vast bureaucracies of governments all over the world to suddenly find themselves starved for money, and look for all manner of demagoguery as they attempt to justify their existence and reimpose another system of wealth extraction upon the private sector of the economy.

The recent protests in Greece and in the U.S. state of Wisconsin were protests by government workers and their economically misguided allies against fiscal responsibility. They are a premonition of what is to come on a much larger scale.

Preserving bloated, unnecessary, inefficient government bureaucracies, will make everybody, including those protesting, poorer. Forcing these people to enter the voluntary sector of the economy and to produce goods and services which you and I will voluntarily pay for will make everyone richer. Those who contend that there is a limited number of jobs in the world over which we must all compete are wrong. The only limit to the number of jobs in the world is the number of needs and desires felt by humanity. In other words, none whatsoever.

Perhaps the most important question of our time is what comes after the dollar’s collapse. The rather obscure question of whether people will be free to choose their own medium of exchange, or if another printable, government currency is imposed on society by the brute force of law is a question between freedom and slavery. It is too late to save the dollar. I hope it is not too late to educate society about the nature of money.

***

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