Vogon Today

Selected News from the Galaxy

Goofynomics

#goofy13: the program (part two)

(… the second part. Lately I've been thinking about it: I was born in '62, I'm sixty-two years old, and as much as I once had faith in science, and as prudent as it is, I recognize that defeating this record is a very low probability, and among other things moving to Abruzzo is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to achieve this. I am therefore in the second part of my life, and of the #goofy13 programme …)

The failure of the European project brings with it a series of not unpredictable consequences which we have been wondering about here for some time and from which (I hope) we have at least partially protected ourselves. The most obvious is the authoritarian turn, the one that the "punturini" only noticed thanks to the lockdown , but which we have seen here before its time, putting it at the center of our reflection since it made a leap in quality: in 2016, after the triple defeat (Brexit, Trump, Renzi) of the system that had massacred Greece in 2015, arousing less indignation than it should have, but, evidently, always more than it would have liked!

Benedetto Ponti will open Sunday by talking about "Disinformation against freedom of expression". The repression of freedom of expression of thought begins when the category of "disinformation" makes its way into the debate. As I have always argued in this blog, commenting on masterpieces of journalism like this one or this one , freedom of expression also includes the freedom of lying, of propaganda, in short: of disinformation. No one contested this principle as long as the Courier (I have given you two examples), the Sun, etc. was the one misinforming, in short: all the clergy of the official media. As soon as social media made it possible to unmask the most obvious hoaxes, but above all as soon as it was seen that the single and accepted argument did not hold, that the state lie did not stem the discontent and its expression at the polls (you will remember the outburst as sincere as it was naive of poor Botteri : "we have never seen such a compact and united press against a candidate…"), the story of the fight against disinformation and debunkers has begun, that court of miracles of zero titles convened and legitimized, as I hope remember, none other than my colleague Boldrini ! The intrinsically aristocratic soul of the left has thus been revealed, which if it really cannot directly attribute the blame for its own failures to those beggars of the voters, it falls back on attributing them to them indirectly, blaming the "disinformers" (who would then be those who say a few months or year earlier than the newspapers say a few months or years later). In short, what happened for the control of monetary emission happens for the control of political discourse, as I explained to you in Pizzoferrato at the end of the presentation of "The Scissors and the Needle" : as long as they were in the hands of the aristocracy, no one he contested. When the people tried to regain possession of it, they realized that it would have been more appropriate to hand over those powers to a pre-political, independent authority, protected from the electoral process: the central bank, or the fact checkers , who have in common the postponement, artificial , specious, ridiculous, to a norm or a "technical" truth allegedly removed from political judgment. It will be interesting to listen to Benedetto.

Following, Maddalena Loy , who also comes from that world (Unità, Rai, etc.), but was then in turn, in a second life, the object of the debunkers ' attention , will moderate a panel on "The Court of Truth " (a tribunal that should be abolished if only because no one has the certainty of being its judge forever…). The panel, together with Benedetto, will be attended by Carlo Magnani , who you already know , and another new entry , Antonio Nicita , professor at LUMSA, now senator of the PD, illo tempore member of AGCOM which allowed similar heights of information (I'll give you a I remember…), at the time when, as we said above, fact checkers were not yet in fashion.

The European peoples did not wake up because they were touched in the deltoid (I remember that the vast majority was and is in favor of offering the deltoid to the Homeland), but because they were touched in the wallet (the vast majority has always been against letting the Homeland search through its wallet )! It is therefore inevitable, when discussing Europe's chances of success, to address the wage issue, especially now that Draghi, as you know, has put it as we put it fourteen years ago (in a monetary union the negative foreign demand shocks are discharged on salary). Savino Balzano , who you know, and Pasquale Tridico , who you also know and is a new entry , will do it for us. As an economist I have been to conferences organized by him, he was kind enough to accept my mutual invitation (" Will you come and have dinner with me? ").

Finally, given that talking about wages, in Europe, is talking about monetary integration (for the reasons briefly mentioned above), I will conclude, to reason with you on how monetary integration is continuing to disintegrate us, taking up the title of one of my papers published online on my fifty-fifth birthday , thirty-eight days before Matteo Salvini offered me a candidacy as an independent. We will look at some numbers together and draw conclusions, which are rather obvious.

Always remember what Jacques Sapir taught us about the end of the USSR: "Everyone was convinced that it could not last, but no one imagined how it could end." In short, the dialectic between irreversibility and unsustainability which we have asked ourselves about so many times here. When men don't have enough imagination, history finds the solutions, or rather, SShistory, which for a few centuries now has regularly shown us that it has less imagination than its protagonists.

But I don't want to repeat myself: I am indeed in the second part of my life, and of the program, but I have not advanced enough to make it excusable to always return to the same subject.

Now you know what awaits you.

See you soon!


This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2024/09/goofy13-il-programma-parte-seconda.html on Sun, 29 Sep 2024 18:37:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.