Not a day goes by without the newspapers reporting on a new case of judicial investigations into episodes of corruption involving public administrators belonging to all parties. They range from Lombardy to Puglia, passing through Emilia, Tuscany, Lazio, Campania, without neglecting Calabria, Sicily and Sardinia. In short, from Etna to the Alps, it seems that the disease of corruption has affected all local administrations and representatives of all parties. In the center then, the case of Senator Lusi is enough to make it clear that in Rome they certainly do not want to disfigure compared to Milan. The Court of Auditors estimates (it is not known exactly how) that the mess between politics and business subtracts 60 billion a year from the national economy. Monti rightly argues that corruption, in addition to the moral and violation of legality aspect, causes significant economic damage both to the state coffers, due to the increase in procurement costs, and to the market, because it distorts the rules of free competition , rewarding the smartest and most open-minded entrepreneur instead of the most efficient one.
Now we would like to run for cover by approving, with appropriate amendments, a bill that has been lying in Parliament for years, with which penalties should be tightened and new hypotheses of crime introduced to replace extortion which, as the OECD has been affirming for some time , as currently formulated, actually offers a convenient loophole to many entrepreneurs who, as concussed, are not punishable. A new law capable of giving the judiciary more efficient tools to intervene is certainly opportune, but given the vastness of the phenomenon it would be illusory to think that more severe penalties or the new formulation of crimes such as false accounting (also considered essential by the Bank of Italy ) can by themselves bring politicians and entrepreneurs back on the right path who have been thriving on this criminal union for too many years.
The heart of the problem lies on the one hand in the excessive weight of the public sector in our economy and on the other in the bad organization of the offices and in the cumbersomeness of the legislation which confuses responsibilities, nullifies controls, circumvents any instance of transparency. After the broom blow that the Mani Pulite season seemed to have given to corruption, it has been seen that little or nothing has actually changed. Perhaps before they stole for the party and now they steal for themselves, but the effects on the economic system are similar if not worse. Why did this happen? Evidently there are deep structural causes which permanently distort our decision-making system and which, as an old popular adage says, offers many opportunities to turn men into thieves. It is therefore not just a question, as Galli della Loggia argues in the Corriere, of a cultural or anthropological deviation that pushes our ruling class towards the ostentation of luxury, the consumption of luxuries. You don't feel powerful if you can't afford to order spaghetti with caviar costing 180 euros!
The truth is that we have maintained an institutional set-up with many levels of government, each one crammed with political representatives, which is costly and inefficient. The cost does not derive only, as the journalists Rizzo and Stella have well documented in recent years, from the salaries of all these gentlemen, but above all from the fact that all these gentlemen are dedicated not to administering the territory of competence (also because in many cases c 'is very little to administer) but to cultivate one's power with clientele or to go about one's business directly. Thus we have Municipalities where there are more traffic policemen than cars, or hospitals ruined by the appointment as manager of bagmen unable to administer, but ready to satisfy the requests, even the fraudulent ones, of their godfathers. Thus the management of Finmeccanica by the previous president, more than colluded with politics, and that of many municipal companies that produce losses for the community, but often good business for politicians and administrators, cannot come as a surprise. We have done a few privatizations and when they have been done, we have not proceeded in the best way.
The problem is that we have a State that directly manages too many things and does so without any criterion of efficiency and economy. This leaves large gray areas where malfeasance creeps in or even when it does not lead to real crimes, there is a great probability of poorly efficient management, with damage from the point of view of the national economy, as serious as those caused by corruption . If we then consider that corruption is almost always coupled with tax evasion, we have a fairly precise idea of how much this situation makes our country unattractive for both foreign investments and by genuine and healthy Italian entrepreneurs.
The Judiciary will certainly have to have an even more penetrating task even if when you hear about the use of "agent provocateurs" you are left a bit perplexed. However, it will not be only the repression with relative extension of telephone interceptions to defeat the phenomenon of corruption. The only way is to reduce the power of politics which today controls a disproportionate portion of the national economy and to reorganize the management methods by public administrations at all levels and, obviously, the related internal controls which can no longer be only formal but they must, in a context of greater transparency, also enter into the merits of the cost-effectiveness of certain choices.
