“Milei he may be good, but the chainsaw is not suitable for Italy”, this is the title of an editorial by Giuliano Ferrara published on The Sheet.
In reality, as we read against the light in the article, we don’t seem to particularly appreciate it turbo-liberal action of the Argentine president. And it does so by expressing a certain understandable political cynicism which, whether we like it or not, represents one of the main characteristics of so-called mature democracies, particularly the Italian one.
In a nutshell, Ferrara judges it impossible to achieve in the Bel Paese what Milei is doing on the other side of the Atlantic as “he doesn’t see himself as the Italian minister Giorgetti, reasonable demoleghist, could ever cut the enormous public spending with a chainsaw, fascinated as it is whispered by the owner of the Casa Rosada, the one who now, despite his disheveled hair, psycholiberal language and cloned dogs, has become the darling of the Monetary Fund and the Economist.”
According to her, “she acts in the Argentine solitude, the country of the abandonment complex, holed up with its follies in the famous end of the world, and is connected to a golden era of the late nineteenth century when a Buenos Aires principles of opulent liberalism reigned. Milei does not know supranational constraints, the civil society of his country is a flatus vocis but very noisy, they have always preferred the political street fight between descamisade plebiscite factions.” All this would not even be conceivable in a country characterized by “un pervasive welfaresystematic, structured, a patronizing state that has always been modular, sometimes at the cost of some somersaults, with the functioning of the markets in Europe, according to experience.”
Furthermore, according to Ferrara, “we are full of external constraints of all kinds, not like Milei who can one day tell the Chinese that they are child-eating communists and the next day sit down with them to examine trade prospects and the balance of payments.”
At this point, reiterating the concept according to which it is the global context in which we are based that prevents us from cutting the public spending with the chainsaw, Ferrara issues his sentence without appeal: “With taxes and spending, experiments are difficult in countries coordinated with the rest of the world rather than abandoned in its extreme, Patagonian tail. It’s fine to flirt with what Milei represents in effigy, to record the fact that with triple-digit inflation the cure doesn’t work at first, to shout about the neoliberal and anarchist miracle, the show is enjoyable and full of potential lessons, but it must be believed that a cautious person like our Minister of Economy should enjoy playing with fire without getting burned by his devouring energy. We are a country where the chainsaw cuts the hand of those who hold it.”
Now, although it is absolutely true that in Italy whoever touches the wires of public spending risks being politically electrocuted, nevertheless between the turbo-liberalism expressed by Milei and our dilapidated bureaucratic-welfare system there is an even wider ocean than the one that physically separates us from Argentina. In this sense, precisely in consideration of the enormous influence on the management of consensus that our colossal public spending exerts, a reasonable liberal cannot expect miracles from whoever occupies the control room. However, and this applies in general to the entire European Union, if we want to reverse the inexorable economic decline which, net of the green follies of recent years, is afflicting the Old Continent, something that goes into the reduction, albeit gradual, of the perimeter public we should necessarily do.
Furthermore, as regards the so-called constraints that Italy has to deal with, it seems to me that Ferrara is a bit confusing. If, in particular, we refer to the European ones, which have been greatly eased after the madness of Covid-19, I would say that the problem is the opposite: we are the ones who struggle to accept even the loosest limits, especially those aimed at maintaining within acceptable limits the budget deficit. So much so that it would be an excellent thing if the vaunted external constraint, which was talked about for a long time after we entered the single currency, had actually worked, preventing our growth from rising. sovereign debt at a very critical level for its sustainability.
Sustainability, i.e. the indefinite ability to pay interest to our creditors, which represents a reality constraint closely linked to responsible management of public finances and which, with debt which has practically reached 3,000 billion euros, should prevent that the pseudo Keynesian follies – above all the catastrophic 110% building bonus – of the yellow-red government are repeated.
From this point of view, precisely in consideration of our always somewhat precarious economic-financial conditions, rather than making fun of Milei and his deadly chainsaw, perhaps for those who analyze without ideological blinders a country afflicted by decades of low growth and a evident excess of current public spending, the Argentine president should instead represent an interesting point of reference for, at the very least, questioning some dogmas of statism which, alas, in Italy especially on the left are disclosed at the level of truth revealed.
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