Come gli amici hanno forse notato, da giorni non ho nulla da dire. Perché nulla di nuovo è accaduto, o quanto meno nulla mi ha ispirato un commento. Per farmi vivo, ecco un testo che ho scritto come esercizio di inglese, per chi volesse fare a sua volta un esercizio di lettura.
REFUSING TO BARK
Imagine a person that is detained and kept in a solitary jail. This person is not allowed to speak to anybody but his warders, and just these, any time they have to deal with him, repeat constantly: “You are a dog, you are dog, you must bark”. Of course, during the first days the person thinks that they are mad, but after weeks and months of this treatment, he is surprised himself when he finds that he is wondering: “Could it be that I am really a dog, since they repeat it constantly?” And from that moment on he understands that he has two options: either he accepts that he is a dog – maybe could even try to bark and so to go insane – or he can answer calmly, anytime the warders speak to him: “No, I am not”. It would be a repetitive procedure, but its repetition would not be his fault.
One could think of such a situation, when considering the “stability law”( the economic plan for the next three years) now under scrutiny in the Italian political arena, that will be discussed presently in the House of Parliament. The Premier and all the ministers with him keep repeating that that plan is intended to reduce taxation, to accelerate an imaginary economic restart, to create new job opportunities and so on. One thinks of that jail because it is very sad to be obliged to repeat to oneself, time after time: “No, it is not true. No, this won’t work. No, they are fooling me”. Nothing to criticize, in particular. It is the entire program that is incredible. We have heard this same song so many times, during the last years, and in particular from the fall 2011, that we are absolutely fed up with this kind of boloney, “vulgo” bullshit. We do not pose as particularly skilled economists, we simply observe that when these promises never work, we have the undeniable right to consider them false. Up to the point that if one day they did, we would think that they have worked for some other reason than the action of the government.
Then, there is a theoretical reason to be bored with all these statements. It is a well known fact that the State, in spite of all its efforts, is not the right organization, if it dares to enter in the economic mechanism. This time, too, it is a question not of speculation, but of plain observation. The most grandiose experience, in this field, is the Soviet Union. There the State was the central, the sole engine of economy, and the result was widespread poverty, and a tyranny to prevent the people to rebel against it.
Of course, in a social-democratic country, the hand of the State is not so oppressive, but such a statement sounds like this one: “Smoking a few cigarettes a day is less harmful than smoking two packets of them”. I.e., in a social-democratic State, public intervention does not become economically helpful, it only produces less damages because it deals with less things.
The tragedy in Italy is that the State has become, bit by bit, more or less Soviet, with the passing decades, and the nation has become poorer and poorer. For more or less thirty years the State has concealed the illness by covering the holes with borrowed money, and that’s why now we have a public debt of roughly 2.030.000.000.000 €. Now we risk that the security markets do not swallow any new State Bonds, and so we cannot take on new debts. But the State has still huge expenses to face, and does not know any other solution than imposing more and more taxes. So it keeps killing more and more productions, loosing jobs, annihilating competitiveness, keeping the nation in an unending agony. And do you want me to bark?
It would be more honest to say that our model is wrong and that there is no solution to Italy’s problem, but a change of society. Taxation must not exceed 30%. No matter what the State does, no matter what its needs are, no matter what it considers its duty to offer, 30% should be considered an insurmountable threshold. How to get this result? No matter how. It is as if we were in a fire: any objection that collides with the necessity of getting out the flames must be rejected.
All this seems farfetched, fantastic, stupidly pessimistic, and the people tend to wait for the sky to re-become blue out of its own initiative. Unfortunately, that stupid dome refuses to do so. But its refusal is largely compensated by the unending reassurances of our government: all is going well, all problems are going to be solved, soon everything will be okay. Sleep well.
As for myself, I prefer the risk of repeating for nth time that I refuse being told fairy tales than to accept what is plainly false. All these plans have not worked until now, and there is no reason why they should work tomorrow. I can let the rest of my nationals believe it, if they so wish, but personally I refuse to bark.
Gianni Pardo, pardonuovo.myblog.it
16 ottobre 2013