Bompiani, in 1982, published the proceedings of a conference held in Rome in October 1981, with a clear title: "The concept of the left". In the report by Massimo Cacciari (Sinisteritas) a radical question is proposed: how to redefine the left but if it still makes sense to want to do it. Many of the participants criticize the identification of the left with Marxist culture, Flores d'Arcais is clear: "There is no arbitrariness in interpreting the concept of the left as a stenogram of freedom, equality, brotherhood". The stenogram derives from a combination of "emotions" and "a collection of values" that "accompany each other historically". A memorable booklet, reprinted by Donzelli for over fifteen years, by Norberto Bobbio begins with the re-enactment of these events: published in the early nineties. The fourth reprint dates back to 1994, but there are more than 2004. The title is dry: Destra e Sinistra, reasons and meanings of a political distinction.
Ten years after Bompiani's volume, the people who discuss and the categories of discussion are the same. The question we must ask ourselves, thirty years after Bompiani's volume, and twenty years after Bobbio's reconstruction, is simple: how come the terms of this interpretation, and the reasons for asking the question, are still based on the same statements and described by the same people then? Right and left are discussed in the world, evidently, but only in Italy, if you compare the themes and the people who express them, you find these identities as immobile cornerstones. In the XNUMXs politics took a turn, with the irruption of Craxi on the scene, the shattering of the historical compromise and the rubble left by terrorism. In 1992 the crisis overwhelms Craxi and his season. But also the Italian economy. Even then, the public debt exceeded 120% of GDP and the spread rose even higher than the eight hundred basis points we reached in the transition between Berlusconi and Monti. The debt collapsed below 100, after the 1992 crisis, thanks to the privatization policy (managed by Mario Draghi at the Treasury) but gradually recovered, and not only due to the first crisis of the global financial market, because, from Giolittismo which preceded fascism , the Italian parties, of left or right, with few exceptions and in very isolated and sporadic cases, they prefer to increase taxes and public spending instead of limiting the tax burden and the size of public contributions levied on the wages of employees. The latest correction maneuvers do not escape this systemic approach. With the result that the tax burden, and the inconsistency of public expenditure results, inflate the state debt and depress the country's income.
Then one feels like overturning the question, transforming it into an answer, an explanation. Why do we talk about left and right in the same terms after thirty years? This dichotomy is nothing more than a phenomenology: only a circumstance, which explains how Italy, whatever people say, has remained immobile, in terms of politics and the economy, for three decades. But, looking carefully at the dynamics of these three decades, an even more tragic circumstance is perceived: perhaps we have remained motionless precisely because we have never come to terms with this dichotomy: right or left? We have adapted to an obsolete map: a geographical map that no longer indicates the territory on which to set foot and travel. Right and Left were born with the French revolution and indicate only the geometry of the seats in the assembly of the newborn democracy: the conservatives to the right of the president and the revolutionaries to the left. In the geography of religion at the right hand of the father stood the good, the elect. The revolutionaries, says Bobbio, contest religion and invert the map: the good guys are on the left. But a large part of Italian and European growth is due to right-wing politics. From the welfare of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Piedmontese infrastructures of Cavour. To the liberal turning point of De gasperi and Einaudi. In short, the ethics of behavior does not uniquely correspond to the map of politics after the French revolution: Right and Left. Whatever the Left says. And even though the Right is not always effective in results and balanced in behavior.
The map, after all, says something simpler: on the one hand the protection of established interests and on the other the driving force of change. Of Marxism in the first place and of positivism, and of the socialism of the chair, when the left is divided. As he always will, from the nineteenth century onwards. For a trivial reason, which contemporary science has long since discovered. Change is never adaptive. There is no linear path from the past to the future that passes through the present. Each change builds its own path and, consequently, leads to a place that has an identity because that identity was imagined and created by those who guided the journey and governed its path. Yesterday's knowledge becomes belief when new knowledge is affirmed. If we talk about nature. The arrangements of the economy and politics combine with each other. There is no market economy that can do without democracy and there is no democracy that can grant maximum freedom to the members of an open society if it is not based on economic freedom and free enterprise. Dani Rodrik rightly says that institutions count more than geography in determining the competitive advantages that guide the future of a nation. And he reminds Europeans that the nation states, which they underestimate and intend to surpass, are the remnants of the French Revolution. But that with them, the nation states, and through them, a new balance must be found for the world and not just for Europe. A balance that Rodrik bases on an enlightening metaphor. Markets are the essence of the market economy as the lemon is the essence of lemonade. But if you only drink lemon juice you find that it is barely drinkable, and certainly not pleasant. While if you dilute the lemon juice with sugar and water it gets better. But if you put too much water, or too much sugar, you ruin the lemonade. Governments must add water and sugar to lemon juice. But the markets, the lemon juice, are necessary so that there is lemonade and not an unpleasant slop. The liberals are wrong to the bitter end, those who think that the state should only step aside: except when they attack the state coffers and do not pay taxes. Those who believe in the rhetoric of public intervention as a panacea are wrong.
When Italian politics discusses the economy, both the Right and the Left do not like the idea of mutually coexisting hierarchy and exchange, public institutions and the market. The temptation to absorb taxes and duties to distribute the effects of fairness and equality "better" (?) is strong: but the pipe that carries water from the rich to the poor is full of holes. And those around the pipes draw water before it can reach the poor. In short, Italy has remained firm in its economic growth and rigid in its social composition: because it still speaks, and in too dated terms, of the Right and the Left. If you construct a table of four boxes where you indicate the intensity of freedom and that of equality, it is easy to see that where there is no freedom there are intrusive states which condemn the population they administer to misery and servitude. With more or less foresight. But only where there is freedom can there be various forms of equality. Where the minimum state prevails, laissez faire, there is likely to be inequality. Because true equality is achieved by public goods and not by the fiscal redistribution of income or by public funding from the cradle to the grave of those who do not have adequate incomes. The tax levy is not the tool to free those who have to deal with the markets from want.
If you want to free them from the disease, you need an offer of medical care; if you want to free them from ignorance, you need the offer of knowledge and if you want to free them from the specter of unemployment, you need to make the economic pie grow, you need someone to produce, the employed, and to be able to consume, with the salary he receives for his work. If you want men free from want, you have to create "public" goods. Public because they include actors and not because state bureaucracies have to produce them. There will be a reason why the monetary production economy, which is a smarter name to talk about market economy, works thanks to a public good, money, and generates more sustained growth when Governments, central banks, banks and companies , thanks to the currency, fuel exchanges and create growth. And there will be a reason why economies, too planned and managed by a widespread and arrogant bureaucracy, because protected by a despotic policy, grow less, often implode, and, if and when they work, govern with an authoritarian trait and export rather than feed domestic consumption of the population.
The fact is that Italy really lost twenty years, maybe even thirty, and is today, in 2012 as it is in 1992. Having recreated left and right in the geographical map of the assemblies but having lost what the words drawn on that map meant: what were the contents of those words which are only symbols. Symbols that evoke other words, many of which have become obsolete as the rest of the world learns better and better how to use the monetary economy of production or, if you prefer, the market economy. He does not speak by opposing the categories – State or Market – but by forcing what they represent to cooperate, State and Market. Let's roll up our sleeves, look at the rest of the world as a bet in which we too can participate and leave right and left to the history books. Learning from the history of the last three decades where positive changes have taken place that we, looking only at our navels, have scrupulously avoided experiencing. Gradually letting our businesses, our public institutions, essential services, infrastructures and the natural environment go down the drain. Governed with bipolar alternation by both the right and the left, both artificially created by alliances to win the elections which soon after became brawls to lose control of the government.
