About us

The Center for Economics and Liberty is an educational and research initiative that aims to promote within the Romanian public sphere a better understanding of the principles behind a free market economy which are, at the same time, the foundation of a society of free people. The Center is the initiative of a group of young intellectuals, whose scientific and editorial preoccupations aim to enhance and disseminate to a broad audiance the knowledge regarding the workings of economics and society – “scientia” in its original meaning of “science”. The principles that govern this “free enterprise” are those upon which civilization, prosperity and peace are built in human society :

• Ideas are the force that decisively contributes, for better or worse, to changing the every day reality in which we live, and thus, it is the responsibility of each and everyone of us to discern and to defend the correct ideas against the wrong ones;

• Liberty is man's highest goal and the basis of its material and spiritual floroushing, while capitalism - or the social order governed by the inaliable right to private property, free-exchange and peace - is the only form of social co-existance which brings about and develops this liberty, for the whole society and for every individual, in an equal manner;

• Individual liberty is an inherent right of every human being, ultimately founded on self-ownership and the ownership of all the material goods legitimately acquired through production or voluntary exchange. Only human beings have property rights and private property is the paradigmatic social foundation of individual freedom. In its absence, it would hardly be possible to distinguish freedom from aggression, responsibility form servitude, justice from injustice and prosperity from poverty;

• Individuals, in all their diversity and concreteness, are the only ultimate data of the social reality. Only human beings act purposely, according to their own desires and plans, in order to improve their faith and in the process their actions give birth to production, exchange and extended social cooperation;

• Society is in fact nothing else than this complex, multi-farious and ever-changing network of economic exchanges (both monetary and non-monetary) made on a voluntary basis by individuals in order to mutually improve their standards of living. The continuous improvements brought by the division of labour and the expansion of this mutually beneficial web of exchanges give rise to the capitalist civilisation. Social cooperation is thus increasingly mediated and organised through the institution of the marketplace, where the allocation of individual property rights is rationalised by way of economic calculation. This institutional environment makes possible, in turn, a continuous growth in labour productivity, capital accumulation and ultimately the material and spiritual development of humanity;

• Interventions in this dynamic market order jeopardize its self-regulating character and their costs ultimately outweigh the benefits. Any infringement or abridgement of the right to private property undermines not only individual freedom – and implicitly the individual – but also disturb and diminish the level of social cooperation. The history of humanity is a permanent struggle between power and freedom, between - on the one hand - the respect of the equal right to private property and the prosperous order which it engenders, and - on the other hand - coercion and material and spiritual decline;

• The State, as the institutionalisation of power against the individual and the private property order, represents the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern era. Its numerous and complex interventions in the economy discourage and distort the economic progress, replacing the spontaneous and mutually beneficial cooperation with an unnecessary institutionalised political conflict between those who produce and those who are subsidised at the expense of the producers. The state is nothing but a parasitic consumer of the resources produced through the voluntary cooperation of individuals in the marketplace. Through the abridgement or total abolition of private property, it creates an ethical void on the normative level, while through its redistributive nature it undermines economic growth and thus destroys the chances at prosperity for many, and especially for the most fragile individuals in society. By making a group of people financially captive sine die, at the expense of another group, the state is also a drag on the spiritual progress of humanity.

Even though the present is tributary to the past, the future is always waiting to be written down. Knowledge of economics and the principles of a free society remains precarious in the Romanian public sphere. The Center for Economics and Freedom was created precisely with the desire of playing a part in filling this void. We strongly believe that freedom has the vocation of being the “realistic ideal" indispensable for the human condition, and that it deserves to be defended and promoted. If this initiative will have even a small contribution in making this goal a more tangible reality, then our purpose has been accomplished.