It's the great day of liberalization. Between the protests of those who have so far enjoyed a privileged niche and the hopes of consumers to see a drop in prices in the short term, there is a risk of creating dangerous illusions and losing the support of public opinion for the start of a healthy, indispensable path to break the many cages that imprison the entire country's drive towards innovation and growth.
It will be good to clarify immediately that liberalizations are unlikely to have immediate and significant effects on the costs of services, but nevertheless they are indispensable so that in all the fields affected by Government decrees a process of seeking greater efficiency can be set in motion and therefore a tendency towards a greater development, with a non-immediate prospect of reducing prices for consumers or reducing costs for the State.
The value of these first decrees of Monti it lies above all in the start of a process of breaking down barriers and protections which have accumulated over the years and which have made Italy one of the least free countries from the point of view of setting up a business or starting a profession. But the vices are so ancient and deeply rooted that there is no hope that everything will change in a few weeks.
Take the taxi drivers which have become (also due to their demerit) the symbol of the Italy of privileges. Increasing the number of licenses does not seem in itself the most effective way to improve the service and reduce its cost. The fundamental point lies in the fact that the licenses granted free of charge by the Municipalities are then freely marketed by the holders, who consider themselves the owners of a public asset which should instead be given for use and then, upon retirement or when the taxi driver retires, returned to the same granting Municipality. Why was such a dubious legality market tolerated for so many years? And how can we gradually put an end to it? This is the issue that should be discussed. And this is the real unmentionable reason for the protests, to say the least over the top, of many taxi drivers.
But that of taxis is also an emblematic phenomenon of how the knots of our economic order have become tangled over the years. Getting your hands on it is essential but also very difficult and it will take time to see the positive effects. Let's take the issue of energy. Dario Di Vico recalls today in the Corriere della Sera that in Italy energy it costs families 12% more than the EU average and that for businesses the higher cost is 26%. But how much will the ownership separation of Snam Rete Gas from Eni or the partial liberalization of petrol stations (correct and positive measures) affect the mitigation of these differences? Probably not much because our difference in prices largely depends on the choices made in the past regarding sources of energy supply, when nuclear power was rejected and reliance was placed on oil and the extremely expensive gas. It will therefore be necessary to make a real energy plan to really reduce the costs of our sources of supply and align our prices with those of other European countries.
Il cost of transport and the inadequacy of the infrastructures is certainly a second factor, after the energy factor, which undermines the competitiveness of our productions. In this case, everything will be entrusted to a new Network Authority with very broad tasks for both the railways and the motorways and local public services. In these cases the problem is not only that of having lower fares but above all that of having greater efficiency so that goods and people can travel more quickly. To do this, new investments are also needed which the tariff system should facilitate and not hinder as there is a risk of doing with the price cap which does not take into account the return on investments. The same thing applies, for example, to water, the subject of a fraudulent referendum which made citizens believe that water, as it is public, must be free. Adding to the confusion is Mr. Bortolussi, of the Cga of Mestre, when he argues that the liberalizations so far have not decreased the prices of the various services for citizens, but rather have often increased them. In this way we do not take into account that tariffs that have been unchanged for years have led to the zeroing of investments in this sector as in other similar ones, and that therefore we are in fact consuming social capital, bringing the country as a whole ever lower and lower in the ranking of efficiency and competitiveness.
Let's think about note. Here the main problem does not seem to be that of increasing the number of these professionals, but that of eliminating a whole series of obligations for which the intervention of a notary is required, such as, for example, amendments to company statutes, extraordinary , certified signatures, which pertain to the administrative bureaucratic formalism of our legal system, but which reduce the economic efficiency of our companies.
be able to restart the development process that has been stopped for 15 years precisely because of the too many plaster casts that have extinguished the vitality of the system, it was necessary to give a strong signal on the direction we will have to take. And this was done. Now, however, it will be necessary to continue with even greater vigor. The real lace is taken from the pockets of the citizens by the public bureaucracy with its Byzantine procedures and by the public services managed locally. It is here that action must be taken to eliminate patronage and waste, the costs of which are then passed on to citizens either with tariffs or with high taxation. Before that, as he rightly points out in an article in the Corriere Galli della Loggia, we should face it the costs of high bureaucracy, now a real caste, which not only enjoys high remuneration, but above all is not used to being evaluated on the basis of the results obtained, but which obviously only takes care, with the necessary exceptions, of formal compliance with the tangle of rules and regulations that it has contributed to set up and of which she is now the most jealous guardian.
So it's good to start liberalizing but it is not with this type of bureaucracy that we will be able to become a modern country, one might say a "normal country".
