To be or to have

Until the outbreak of the First World War, there was a flow of Swiss people on the Swiss border every day who came to Italy to work and returned home in the evening: a century ago they were the border workers.

In 1936, in the midst of the Fascist era, the socialist Alberto Beneduce (1877 – 1944) separated the commercial banks from the finance banks, nationalized the Banca d'Italia and forbade the free movement of foreign capital in Italy.

Between 1950 and 1960 Mattei and Eni supplied methane and oil to Italy.

In 1953, Italy was so rich that it canceled half of the debt that Germany owed it. The other half was also never paid.

In 1954 Olivetti produced the first Personal Computer in the world.

Between 1955 and 1960 the lira was the strongest and most stable currency in all of Europe and made premium on gold [1] .

In the 1970s, students who matched their study plan received a salary from the university to be able to study and live.

In the mid-1970s, buses in Bologna were free.

In the 1980s, Italy was the fifth most industrialized country.

Until the 1980s, Italy was the most politicized country in Europe.

In 2000, Italians were the richest people in the world with an average bank deposit of €35,000 each.

In 1990, 70% of Italians owned their home, in 2007 the percentage had risen to 81%, the highest in the world.

THEN what happened?

The First World War plundered the Italian economy while Switzerland enriched itself from the deposits of the rich people of the nations involved in the war.

Germany has not paid its debts from either the First or Second World War, first because it did not have the money and then because it had to reunite.

In 1960 Eng. Adriano Olivetti was traveling on a train and when the train leaves a tunnel Olivetti is dead. A year later, Mario Tchou, the engineer who had invented Elea 9003, the world's first transistor personal computer, dies in a strange road accident. With these two deaths, information technology passed from Italy to the US of IBM.

In 1962 a bomb crashes the plane on which Enrico Mattei was flying, and also precipitates the realization of an energy autonomy of Italy which returns under the control of the Seven Oil Sisters of the USA and Great Britain.

The lira was attacked by the dollar and we are once again subject to the political, economic and cultural power of the UK and the USA.

Are Italians too politicized? And then we depoliticize them! Like?

• Feeding idiotic radio and TV programs every day makes everyone idiotic;
• By making believe that the important thing is football, he distracts himself from the real problems; we are the only country in the world with three sports newspapers coming out every day!!
• If the wine is too strong, it can be diluted, as has been done with the Italians: 10 million hungry immigrants without political ideas have diluted 45 million politicized Italians with clearly in mind what rights they had acquired in a century of fights. A good implementation of the Kallergi Plan.

The secretariats of the parties have chosen and sent increasingly corrupt, corruptible, deficient, criminal, ignorant, mafia people to parliament and to the government. Politicians who thought of being re-elected, not statesmen who thought of the good of the population.

The trade unions have suffered the same fate, one fact is enough: in 1975 a group of greenhorns with no money to follow the student and factory struggles opened Radio Alice in an attic in Bologna, a radio free from Rai's control. The Radical Party, a group of others without money, has been transmitting its ideas from Rome throughout Italy for forty years. In the world of global communication, the trade unions with the largest mass of workers in the nation still do not have a radio, a newspaper, a flyer or a megaphone with which to communicate with the workers and the unemployed. Political blindness? Stupidity in power? Plan to depoliticize the population?

Public transport, once free to facilitate public transport and reduce pollution, has passed from the public to the private sector and the private sector who only thinks about raising cash charges heavily for transport.

To raise the cultural level of the population a century ago the state invested in education and a teacher had a salary equivalent to that of a magistrate, today to that of … does he still have a salary?

Thanks to IRI, its banks and state-owned companies, Italy has always had an industrial structure capable of carrying out research and developing new technologies which, in cascades, also ended up with small private companies. Since Britannia guests disembarked on a cruise around the Italian coast, the Prodi/Berlusconi tandem, in power for a quarter of a century, has deconstructed IRI, given away the jewels of the state and demolished Italy's industrial and banking power realizing von Hayek's liberal state project.

In 1992 the socialist Giuliano Amato and his companions destroy the Beneduce reform: they allow the free circulation of foreign capital in Italy (globalization), they privatize the Bank of Italy, they allow the mixing of commercial and financial banks, they privatize the public sector.

The introduction of the euro suddenly halved the capital of Italians. A coffee that cost a thousand lire now costs one euro, or double, and like coffee now everything costs double.

The decline in wages was added to the decline in purchasing power. In 1974, to buy a house of 60 square meters in Milan, it took three years and six months of an employee's average salary, in 2015, for the same square meters, nine years' salary was needed, today 11.

In the 1950s and 1960s it was common to see families with two or three children; with the salary of a single person you lived decently, you bought appliances, a car and then a house. Today 30% of Italians are single or separated, 20% are childless couples, 50% are married and rarely have more than one child. Politics and the economy have destroyed the Italian family.

The brick, the traditional safe haven of Italians, the only asset that has always been revalued over time, with the introduction of energy classes has become an asset that not only does not revalue over time but, like a car, with years it loses value, depreciates, has an maintenance cost that will never be recovered. With a simple and apparently innocuous law, even bricks have been hit, and the heritage of Italians decreases more and more in value.

In 1951 7% of the population was over 65, today a quarter of the Italian population is over 65.

Every year 145,000 young people, usually university graduates or with a high level of education, emigrate to other states with a better economic, political and cultural situation.

What to do? Lenin wrote a century ago…

Those who stay in Italy can only choose between:

• accept to impoverish more and more o
• throw yourself into the fight and change the course of history and of Italy.

A choice that can be summed up in two verbs: to be or to have.

To be balls or to have balls

© Galileo Ferrara

[1] Agio, or having agio, means that it was preferred to gold because it was considered safer and therefore paid more than its official exchange for gold.

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The article To be or to have comes from Scenari Economici .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/essere-o-avere/ on Sun, 18 Dec 2022 21:02:37 +0000.