Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Author: PieInTheSky

  • Free Will, Moral Agency, and Libertarianism

    While there is a lot of talk of free will in various circles, I always wonder if this has any impact on political libertarianism. Is the question of free will relevant to politics? Or is it more just academic?

    Quoth the Wikipedia: Libertarianism is one of the main philosophical positions related to the problems of free will and determinism, which are part of the larger domain of metaphysics. In particular, libertarianism, which is an incompatibilist position, argues that free will is logically incompatible with a deterministic universe and that agents have free will, and that, therefore, determinism is false. Although compatibilism, the view that determinism and free will are in fact compatible, is the most popular position on free will amongst professional philosophers.

    The first recorded use of the term “libertarianism” was in 1789 by William Belsham in a discussion of free will and in opposition to “necessitarian” (or determinist) views.”

    I will not really answer the question of life, free will, and everything. The great free will debate has been, is, and will be raging in the foreseeable future, most likely dragging neuroscientists, physicists, philosophers, and everyone else for the ride.  I am neither of those things, but a humble guy in possession of internet access, and as such I have my 0.02 fraction of bitcoin/gold ounce/fiat currency of choice to contribute to the proceedings. And so I shall.

    I decided to write … well did I really decide? Maybe from the first moment of the Big Bang it was determined that I will. Oh well, the grandfather of all knowledge must know… Anyway…

    I fairly unambiguously believe in free will – because, otherwise, what is the point of it all? My definition of free will may be tailored to confirm my belief, but without it, if everything is predetermined, is there a use for debate or philosophy – besides being predetermined to debate, obviously? I perceive things as if I have at least some amount of free will, so having it or not, by some scientific criteria or other, is not that relevant to me. I couldn’t tell the difference, either way.

    Obviously I am but a man, and as such, bound by human nature and environment. These things affect everyone. Person X and Y would not make the exact same choices in similar circumstances – there is no such thing as identical circumstances – because each human is different from every point of view. But people being who they are, the existence of some inherent constraints to decisions, does not change the simple reality that humans can and do make decisions.

    Free will in my view is that one is put in the position of choosing, and one can use whatever reason and life experience one possesses to do so. All the things that make me me – being either nature or nurture – are part of what constitutes my free will. At least the way I see it.

    Decide, get feedback, analyse, change. There are always constraints in nature – gravity, the need for food and air, laws of thermodynamics, and many more. Being bound to human and individual nature does not negate free will, like being short preventing you from playing basketball does not negate free will.

    Now some may say at this point you are your brain chemistry, or some such. Be that as it may, there are unique chemical and electrical processes inside each individual human brain. Whether there is or isn’t something more than that to conscience or soul is not essential. Free will can be simply a faculty of the uniqueness of the brain – which leads to each brain making its own decisions, processing data in its own way.

    Some will add stories about people who had an accident and could no longer control themselves. Some people are sometimes, harsh as it may sound, broken. But most normal people are not. The existence of the blind does not negate that humans in general have sight.

    That is not to say you should judge people harshly on their decisions or that you should completely ignore their life and environment. But you can neither eliminate capacity to decide. We all make a bad choice here and there, but 100 bad choices without learning anything, that is something else entirely. And some choices cannot be excused. Taken to extreme, it is not a rapist’s fault he raped someone because he was born one or society made him one.

    Agency and responsibility are part of what makes us human, differentiates us from the simpler creatures – aka food. Humans can go beyond instinct. If you remove agency from people and go to predestination you, in a way, dehumanize, or at the very least infantilize them.

    In pure mechanical views, humans may be seen as a neural network of sorts: get an input, process it in a way, gen an output. Compare the output to the desired one, and if it is lacking go through a learning algorithm to improve processing. Free will is in the uniqueness of all these factors and the ability to consciously realize how these things work, to change the way you process things, to adapt your learning algorithm. The fact that you are aware of what you are, that you are aware how your choice works, that you are not led by blind instinct.

    If you look at free will as something outside physical reality, like God or Soul and whatnot, then the question of is there free will, like the question of the soul, cannot be answered. If you look at it as the existence of reason and self-awareness, like I do, well, there it is.

    So is the question of free will relevant to libertarian politics? Not really, I would say. Everyone is a unique, separate entity, with their own preferences and their own choices. Whether these are purely chemistry or something else is not a factor. You perceive what you perceive, wherever it comes from. As such this has nothing to do with political questions.

    Even if each human being is “predetermined,” he is predetermined in a unique way which gives a unique preference. Even assuming subjective preference is predetermined, it does not change how this manifests in the market and does not change that humans still want to fulfill that preference to achieve subjective satisfaction. There is no valid argument over the predetermined preference of some being imposed by force over the predetermined preference of others.

    Some would say than some people are programmed to make bad choices and can do nothing about it, others are programmed to make better choices. Despite the previously mentioned dehumanising qualities of this view, there is absolutely no way of telling who these people are or getting them into position of power. There is not a clear argument for substituting someone’s preferred outcome to another’s.  And no way to decide if “bad choicers” will be better off with others making their decisions.

    Off course it is very possible that we are all predetermined not to live in libertarianism, but under a bunch of incompetent sociopaths. Could go either way, really.

  • Libertarians and the Law

    By PieInTheSky

    One way of looking at things would be that there are two spheres for each person: the individual – where one acts according to subjective preference – and the common – where the individual ones meet and sometimes come in conflict. Freedom to swing your fist, my nose, etc.

    In each human society, such a conflict must be handled.  Conflicts in the common sphere are generally covered by, as Bastiat said, The Law. The Law in this case is not legislation but a subset of morality, and it usually exists absent of a specific government, religion, or whatever. Libertarianism, and the final form – anarchy – are still human societies and as such they have The Law.

    As a self-proclaimed libertarian, I believe in free people acting voluntarily to reach whatever their goals may be. I believe in a free market, in goods and services, and whatever people make and need. This all goes without saying, really. But of course, problems arise and one cannot be completely free in a densely populated world.

    So what about justice, in the sense of implementing The Law? This is not really product, in the sense that is not produced, distributed, traded, stockpiled, and whatnot. You cannot go short on justice because you expect a weak justice harvest. It is a service, but one unlike any others. The free market, for it to be free, must be free from aggression. And this is where justice comes in. As such, it can be viewed as outside the market, due to everything in the market depending on it.

    It can be viewed as just another component of the market, as it does cost resources in administering it. It usually has the characteristics of what economists call a public good, as in non-excludable and non-rivalrous.  Justice should be available to all, and giving justice to A does not reduce justice for B. Philosophically, application of the law is the one service in a society that should not depend on wealth, status, or any other characteristic of an individual. As such, it is unlike other services.

    Law which is not enforced is merely a bunch of suggestions, so each society needs a way to administer and enforce it – this is the goal of justice. Society – despite what many keep claiming – is not government, but in the case of justice, it is usually a government prerogative. Voluntaryists (what is it with politics and weird spelling?) and/or anarchists say this can be done better outside of government, all others see it as a core function of government, some as the only core function of government. But all flavours of political ideology accept rules and their enforcement, the how differs.

    Any political view that sees a place for a government, from minarchists to socialists, sees justice as a main function of government, up to the only legitimate function.

    The justice as the sole role of government can be seen in, for example, Kritarchy which can be interpreted simplistically as rule by judges. The origin of the word is in ancient Israel before the rise of kings, but modern versions are found, for example, in the Xeer system of Somalia. (You know the one, Somalia anarchy ROADZ or other such things randomly screamed at libertarians, although the areas of Somalia ruled by Xeer seem to do better than the ones ruled by government).

    Kritarchy is a legal and political system associated with structures of polycentric or stateless traditional societies, based on customary rather than statutory law, and it is very often close to notions of natural law. Medieval Iceland is another example. To be honest, I do not see these societies as stateless. But this depends on the definition of state. Governance in one form or other always existed: clan leaders, tribal leaders, warriors, shamans, elders, whatever. But there has always been authority where there have been humans. And this authority was generally accepted and imposed. So when does this become a state? And when anarchy? Or is anarchy just extreme decentralization? People will live in communities, and those communities will have rules. I simply do not see an ancap world in which each has his piece of property defended by private security and private courts of justice. There would be at least HOAs and such.

    The question is how is justice best delivered? Can there be a market for it, separate from or identical to the one for everything else? I don’t see it that way, not as a pure market solution, but something else.

    Justice should be accepted and enforced. After it is pronounced, it is not voluntary any more. The nature of the courts aside, the ruling must stand. Pending appeal, of course, and if you happen to live in Italy, 7 years of trials later maybe there is a resolution. The only voluntary thing may be choice of courts. If the decision is not respected, the offending party must be somehow coerced, by imprisonment or being socially ostracized or something else.

    Enforcing the law can be the purview of the courts, or of different organisations, more or less independent. Enforcement may have a market structure more readily. See bounty hunters for a quick example.

    Whatever views on delivering justice, for me it is clear that the current system is broken, irrespective of the country involved. Some, as always, more than others. Justice should be a cornerstone of society, as such it must be fixed. Most likely a society with better rules and system of justice will require less ruling and enforcement, as people will more likely respect the law. A good society is one that generates little crime, not one that punishes effectively, and those two things are not always the same.

    So what are the options? The way I see it, at least: government courts run by taxes or fees, private courts run like a regular business, Kritarchy style system of traditional courts. In Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, if I remember correctly, parties in conflict simply agreed on a citizen, usually well respected by the community, to decide, and agreed to respect whatever he decided.There are disadvantages and advantages to, well, anything. In general, reality is only trade-offs.

    Government has the advantage of a special legitimacy in the eyes of many people, which brings enough enforcement power. What it also brings is too much power, bureaucracy, politics in everything, lobbying, excessive legislation and overreach, and often a lack of accountability. It does not depend directly on money from the involved people, but money is always present in one form or another.

    If a victim is dead or helpless and cannot pursue justice, justice can still be met, as government has agents for that express purpose, and this may not be the case in fully private circumstances. On the flip side, when a strong government commits an injustice, there is little redress for the wronged. Of course, many things influence government justice negatively: bribes, corruption, and politics to name a few.

    Justice and Liberty never looked so good

    Private courts of justice can end up more decentralized, with the risk of less uniformity and predictability. Their legitimacy will be lower and their enforcing power potentially more limited, with good and bad consequences. They must be to a point agreed upon by involved parties, someone must pay, and there must be some agreements between different private courts. Accusations of special interest might be stronger than with government, not really justifiably so, but nonetheless…

    Citizens, ad-hoc courts, or juries have a chance to be less controversial and more acceptable than private courts. Get a few people of good standing who are invested in their community and have a ruling. Of course this would not be without controversy – nothing is really – and many will question their motives, integrity and capability – not being professional judges.

    There can also be a hybrid system of private lower courts – this is often the case with mediation- and government as appeal courts.

    My personal favourite form of justice is trial by battle, let the gods decide.

    Justice in the end must be, well… just, lawful, universally applied, predictable, and generally accepted by the society. A system of justice like the asshole who is president of Philippines supports is not something to strive for.

    Do I have a conclusion? No, this is mostly musing and thinking out loud, as I am a little on the fence about it. So, justice, how do you like yours?

  • Easter in Romania

    Romanians tend to love their holyday feasts. So much so that the news next day has a section dedicated to how swamped the ambulances were by people sick from overeating or over drinking. Binging is often the norm, for reasons, I assume, and can be the subject of some sort of study or other.

    Were I inclined to speculation, and luck would have it, I happen to be, I would say that partially it has to do with being a poor country with a history of privation. People who don’t usually get to indulge, pick a few holydays, save money, make effort and sacrifice other things, and have a couple of big meals. It may be a status thing – show your wealth via a big feast. Maybe it’s just a hang up from pre-modern times. Romanian weddings can be quite excessively lavish, for similar reasons.

    It may be the long lent before Easter. Seven weeks of no animal products, no meat, no eggs, no dairy, in late winter and early spring when most of the fruits and vegetables that would make going vegan easier do not grow, and the staples are potatoes, beans, cabbage, and maybe zacusca. Although few keep full lent these days.

    But this is not about why Romanians binge on Easter. It is about what they binge on. Which is lamb. And usually lots of eggs. And spring onions. And combinations of the above. Traditionally, a family buys a whole lamb, which is cooked and eaten nose to tail. Little is thrown away, and trying all the different dishes may be a reason for overeating.

    My family’s lamb was 11 kilograms this year, but as we do not really overeat as much as other Romanians (never has someone gotten sick from too much food), some of it goes to the deep freeze. Other parts are cooked as you may see in the following pictures of a full Romanian Easter Feast. I will not claim it to be typical of all or even most Romanians, but let’s say it’s authentic enough.

    The day starts with coloured eggs, which are smashed together before eating. One person holds an egg, another hits it with his own. The one doing the hitting says “Christ has risen” and the one on the receiving end answers “Truly He has risen.” And this goes on until as many eggs are smashed as people want to eat. The eggs are simply peeled and eaten with salt, pepper, and maybe mustard, with some cheese, radishes, and spring onions.

    Drob

    The meal is usually supplemented with drob, which is an Easter dish made thus: take the organs of the lamb and maybe a little meat, boil, chop finely, mix with beaten eggs and fine chopped spring onions, season to taste, stuff in the lambs stomach – properly cleaned in advance – and roast in the oven. White wine is generally drunk during this morning meal, although beer can be a substitute.

    The second meal of the day – first lunch, around 1 pm, and usually my favourite, is Ciorbă, which I am not always sure how to describe. It’s a type of soup which Romanians differentiate from other type of soup, which is just called soup. More often than not, Ciorbă is sour, but not always. Wikipedia link for the curious. Ciorbă depends on the ingredients and the souring agent, which is often Borș (more wikipedia) of similar etymology but different from Russian borsch, but it can also be soured with lemon, vinegar, pickled cabbage juice, or a type of Verjuice made from unripe fruit, most often grapes or cherry plums.

     

    Ciorbă one way…
    …And another way.

    The base of the ciorbă is mostly large bones of the lamb with a little meat – the best parts of meat are saved for grilling and roasting – the bors and all sorts of vegetables and greens. Easter being in spring, usually all sort of weeds start growing and are added for flavour. Sorrel, Rumex patientia, which I don’t know how to properly say in English, ramsons, and others. What is never missing is lovage, added during cooking and fresh chopped as a garnish before eating. My mother makes the ciorbă more sour than most – bors and sorrel contribute to this, which is how I like it and also makes a decent hangover helper.

    Besides the liquid, you get an piece of bone with some meat on it. The choice piece is traditionally the whole lamb’s head, especially for the brains – Romanians eat brains in lots of ways, mostly formed into patties, breaded and fried. I never liked the texture of brain so avoid it – this was considered strange when, as a kid people offered me the brain as a special treat, and I refused. Anyway, I don’t care for a whole lamb’s head, though my cousins liked it so much that my aunt had a huge pot and boiled five whole heads bought from the butchers in her ciorbă so each member of the family got one.

    By afternoon some barbecued lamb is made – usually ribs and chops and such – and the red wine is brought forth. The lamb usually does not have any sides – it is eaten with a lot of mixed greens salad. Not much to say about this one, it is meat on charcoal really.

    Whomever is hungry in the evening eats some of the over roast meat – with a sauce based on a ton of green onions and some wine.

    Cozonac
    More cozonac!

    During the day traditional pastry is also eaten.

    Pasca, which basically means Easter cake, is made of a pastry with lots of cheese, not too sweet. Cozonac is pastry with various fillings – most often walnut or cocoa, sometimes Turkish delight. I prefer the walnut myself. The pastry also goes well with a nice glass of wine. In fact there is an old Romanian saying – Is there anything better in life than cozonac with wine? Yes, wine…

    And that is about it for this. Here’s some pheasants on the lawn on Easter day…

  • Liberty de Facto, Liberty de Jure: Freedom Helped by Corruption

    If a law is broken in a forest, and there’s no cop around to see it, was it really broken? But what if the cop sees it, but you slip him some cash to go away?

    Question: are the words freedom and liberty synonymous? I will probably use them interchangeably but that may be wrong. Anyway… The post at hand.

    Romania, as other countries like it, has many things in insufficient supply. Scarcity, after all, is the norm. One of the things not lacking, however, is legislation. We have a bunch of that and it’s mostly stupid. Well, that is harsh, but at the very least contradictory, unclear, or just plain, well… dumb. What else is abundant is corruption and government incompetence. These might as well be national sports like Oina (similar to baseball, but better). So the default MO of many people is simply ignoring the laws they don’t like. One can say the law is irrelevant without enforcement, as rules become but suggestions. But is it really irrelevant, or is there something deeper going on there?

    Freedom!

    Does corruption or government incompetence in fact aid freedom? Can you be free in practice – de facto – but not de jure – in the eyes of the law? Well yes… and no. Yes, as in for many this may be true, no as in not for all and it is a bad way of going about things.

    As long as bad laws exist, if agents of the state decide to fuck with you, they can. You run into someone with a chip-on-shoulder situation, or the occasional example must be set, or fine/arrest quotas must be met. Police and prosecutors in many countries have the occasional urge to look good in the press by showing how the fight lawlessness, get results, and the like. This does not affect most of us. But what if you are the one in a thousand or million who gets the dubious honour of being the example set?

    Remember a case a while ago where a bunch of guys in the US were visited by the cops for posting reviews on an escort site? Lizzie NB reported upon it. Well, many people probably used escort forums throughout the country without much issue – until a dozen or so unlucky bastards had the cops come to their door.

    Corruption can help freedom a lot if you are well connected or well off enough to afford the cost of bribes. But if you are not, no freedom for you. And if one is connected enough, it can go beyond the understanding of freedom in a libertarian sense and go towards a freedom from consequence even if your actions violate others’ rights and liberty. Getting away with rape and murder is not really liberty.

    In Romania, outside the big cities, things are controlled by the political machine of some party or other, led by “local barons.” It is not an exaggerated term; they control everything and nothing moves in their area without their say so. If you have a good job in Bucharest, corruption can aid your freedom. If you live in Teleorman County, the situation is different. Although, if you don’t want to start a business, make money, and you pay deference to the High Lord, you are pretty much left alone to your own devices. If subsistence agriculture and moonshine is the life for you, great.

    As an anecdote,  as a high school and university student in Romania, one of the freedoms I perceived at the time – a more innocent period where I cared nothing of politics, philosophy, ethics, law, and other things that burden the human mind – was that the internet was cheap, fast, and torrents were abundant. The government and your friendly neighbourhood ISP gave not one damn of copyright, so we could literally pirate everything – movies, books, music, software. Now, I do not want to go in discussions of IP, copyright, the ethics of internet piracy. Suffice to say is that if you were a broke Romanian student, you would have done the same. Look into yourselves; you know it to be so. But the perceived freedom of the mighty bittorrent is not so important any more as one becomes older and wiser. Or at the very least older.

    Being outside the law carries risks beyond dealing with agents of the state, for which you cannot seek redress, by being exposed to underworld violence, shoddy products, unreliable contracts, and much more. The problem in countries like fair Romania is that sometimes laws are bad enough that there is little choice but trying to avoid them.

    Romania is a country with fairly low freedom in principle but somewhat higher in practice. Taxes and economic regulations are quite firmly on the high side of how these things go. But they are also routinely ignored. The so called underground economy thrives. You pay many a tradesman under the table. You can buy many things without paying the VAT.

    Romania has high taxes, and they are inconsistently applied. Being able to avoid high taxes is not the precisely same as not being highly taxed. The end result may be similar on some level, but you are breaking the laws, are liable for punishment, and doing things under the table leaves little recourse if something goes wrong.

    Many rent property or work jobs without any proper forms – with the risks implied in not having a contract or some sort of clear deal. High taxation discourages this. So you have some added freedom if you don’t making a contract, but you lose the benefits of the contract.

    Prostitution and any and all drugs are illegal, with little chance of decriminalization any time soon. The subject is not even being talked about. But you can access all the illegal drugs and/or escorts you wish (at least of the female variety, no idea of other genders). But you do all this while breaking laws and risking punishment. You can easily buy drugs in Romania, but often they are bad merchandise from shady dealers and there’s nothing to do about it if you get screwed. So yes, there is some added freedom, but not in the real sense of buying quality weed from a trusted merchant in the open.

    ILLEGAL!

    Prostitution is quite abundant, with plenty of good choices at reasonable prices (not to advertise, mind you), but with all the implied risks from being in the underworld, many dangers for clients, more for escorts. And the cops are sometimes worse than the pimps for the safety of a woman in the trade.

    Liberty in hiding just isn’t the same, constantly looking over your shoulder, jumping barriers that should not be there. Maybe it is better than nothing, but less than ideal. De facto liberty can be fickle, undependable, erratic, and inconsistent. It may give you a false sense of security, believing things will not change. But you never know when the inspector you bribed changes his mind or is replaced by another. Maybe you will bribe that one as well, maybe not. Maybe you will be picked as an example for the press of cracking down on offenders.

    Another point is what is the long term effect? Can people learn to like liberty and want it in the open, or does being able to avoid laws reduce the incentive to actually go through the process of changing the laws? Will people want more liberty or become complacent with what they have? But enough with the questions.

    The internet in recent times allows some more avoiding of consequences of being outside the law. One example is the previously mentioned prostitution forums. They can help clients identify bad service and escorts identify violent customers. In can help escorts escape pimps, get better work, etc. It is, of course, just a small band-aid on a large wound, but it may help some a little. But long term, no matter how much internet, cryptocurrency and whatever, it is not substitute for a small government respecting liberty. It is just what we got.

    So … liberty… how do you like yours?

  • Moonshine and Communism

     

    So I wanted to try the whole guest post business on this fair website, and decided to go for something with local, well… flavour, if you will. A bit on the always popular booze with a little bit of commentary on government. And here it is.

    Romanians enjoy the local hooch, to the surprise of nobody, which some translate plum brandy (although brandy comes from wine, but you can have plum wine as well, I suppose), but locals call it ţuica (the diacritic t is actually a pronounced like the ending of ants) and variations thereof are fairly common round the east of Europe and variously called palinka, slivovitz, or rakia. You get the idea.

    Tuica Still

    Like many a Romanian, I occasionally partake of the stuff, though my taste generally goes for Islay malts. And I can assure you, fellow libertarians, that it is proper moonshine made in an unlicensed still with no business of the government in the making. Some of the more skittish western folk think this dangerous or unwise. It is not. I have yet to know people having trouble from this. More often, cheap knockoff vodka causes issue, but tuica makers often are skilled and proud of their craft. Is there no bad stuff? Of course there is, but not if you know the people making it or what to buy.

    Making decent plum moonshine is surprisingly easy, in fact. My grandma used to make some on a small still on the stove in a small Bucharest apartment kitchen. My parents occasionally make some on a small still in their yard. I took part in some of that myself, and I buy it from people who make larger quantities. It’s about 5 of your American dollar per litre (yes, litre, like civilised folk measure things).

    My grandfather was from the Pitesti region of Romania, one of the famous tuica producing regions. My family still has some land there with a couple hundred or so plum trees, hence the predilection of my family to make tuica. When we visit the area in autumn, we pick some of the plums and distill them, more for the sake of it really, based on the effort it would be easier just to buy.

    This region produces a lower alcoholic version, which many prefer, because you can drink a higher quantity of liquid for the same drunkenness level. People spend time talking and drinking, so the glasses add up. In Transylvania or Moldova, people are partial to 40, 50, or sometimes even 60 abv. But I usually drink the 25 – 30 abv stuff from Pitesti, mostly mulled in winter (with a bit of sugar, pepper, cinnamon, and whatever else you want to throw in it).

    Plums. Obviously

    My grandpa’s family had a bigger plum orchard before the glorious regime of the proletariat. They also had a pub in the city of Pitesti. Those days, most common folk that drank in pubs drank tuica as their spirit of choice or country wine. Other spirits were for the fancy people with high incomes, and beer was not as common as today. My grandfather’s pub sold their own tuica and barter wine.

    Many poor people these days drink cheap, counterfeit plonk called “whiskey like alcoholic beverage,” or “tequila flavour beverage,” or just grain alcohol, cheap vodka, and there are people who blame this for bad health and alcoholism. They speak of the good old days when people drank tuica and wine and were more healthy, although this has a tinge of nostalgia for Merry Old Romania and bucolic fantasy.

    There was not much wine being made in the immediate region, but reasonably close were some wine regions. So every autumn, the family would load the oxcarts (trucks were more expensive and the roads not great in 30s Romania) with barrels of tuica and started slowly for the wine areas, and bartered it for wine. The wine areas themselves made a cheaper moonshine from pomace left over from wine grapes, but most preferred the plum stuff.

    The reason Pitesti is a tuica area, well one of the reasons besides people drinking lots, is the fact that it is a high plain or low plateau that is fairly dry and has permeable rock strata, so the water aquifer is pretty deep. That and poor soil meant agriculture was not efficient for many crops. But plum trees, for some reason, thrived in the area. That worked from time immemorial (which is anything more than 100 years give or take) until the great planned economy of Mr. Ceausescu kicked in.

    You see the area, on maps at least, is sometimes called the high plains of Pitesti. And when communist officials read a map they thought, like all reasonable people would think, plain means growing wheat. And as such, after collectivisation of the land into the fabulous agricultural cooperatives, a lot of plum trees were taken out in order to plant wheat. As the savvy reader may imagine based on the story, wheat did not exactly thrive there. But communists were nothing if not perseverant in their folly. So it went on for a while. This is one of those situations where the good ideas of communism were improperly applied, or something.

    Look, if you can’t tell the difference between plum blossoms and cherry blossoms…

    After regime change, communism was replaced with the faux social-democratic-kleptocracy that is characteristic of the present. The plum trees were replanted and tuica came back; although it never fully left, just decreased in quantity and quality. As you could not find much in stores, there was quite the demand for alcohol during communism. There were stories of drinking medicinal alcohol – filtered in various ways to get rid of the vivid blue colouring and eventual toxic components. A bottle of imported Whiskey was better than money. Much better.

    After grandpa got the land back, he replanted plum trees. He was living in Bucharest by then, and never did much with the orchard, so I think it was more nostalgia than anything else. After he died, the orchard was less maintained by us Bucharest dwellers, we just payed a local to do some basic maintenance. But I still have a couple of hundred “family” plum trees somewhere, should I choose to ditch the day job and get in the tuica making business. I can then smuggle it in the US, and sell it to make my fortune.