'A constituent assembly to free Italia from debt and bureaucracy'

'Every promise is debt... public'. In the days when deficit spending is again being called for from many quarters, the president of the Einaudi Foundation Giuseppe Benedetto - in his new book, 'Liberal is. Preaching uselessly' (Rubbettino, 156 pages) - reminds us that 'a liberal is someone who knows that debt is above all a form of deferred taxation, which sooner or later must be dealt with'.

In the book, freshly published and already available in bookshops and on all digital platforms, the issues that have been holding the country back for decades, compromising any possibility of growth, are addressed. Benedetto takes a journey into the deepest contradictions of Italia: a country where those who work are taxed, those who waste are rewarded and those who produce are hindered.

Doing business here, the essay says, remains more difficult than in other European countries. One of the main handicaps our companies face is the tax burden, which is about six percentage points higher here than in Spain, the fastest-growing country in Western Europe for the past couple of years. Our country is crushed under the weight of its enormous public debt. Reducing the size of the state, Benedetto argues, means being liberal and a state where public spending is still 51% of GDP and where the tax burden is as high as 43% of GDP is not exactly very liberal.

The other major stumbling block against which anyone who wants to start a project in Italia is the slowness of the public machine. Bureaucracy is the Moloch that immobilises our country, the 'Hydra' that Benedetto calls it. Not just a set of offices, but a cultural humus whereby every problem is answered with a new form, a new law, a new ex ante control that indiscriminately blocks productive activity.

In the second part of the essay, ample space is devoted to what has become a true symbol of bad governance: the Regions, those that, with prophetic foresight, Malagodi, back in 1970, had already indicated as the emerging centres of waste. The current institutional set-up has multiplied decision-making levels and tax harassment for citizens without increasing the quality of services, generating widespread deresponsibility. In the vision of Luigi Einaudi and the post-World War II liberals, territorial autonomy served to make the link between taxes and services transparent, to make administrators accountable, and to reward the best solutions. The Region was to be a laboratory of efficiency and innovation. The actual result, however, told a different story.