Let's Trade Democratic Parties
Walter Veltroni, leader of Italy’s center-left Democratic party, certainly sounds like a right-winger, judging by this Wall Street Journal profile.
[Veltroni] is also trying to push what he sees as a common-sense approach to Italy’s most intractable problems — such as excessive red tape and high taxes. Whereas currently 60 separate permits are required to open an auto-repair shop, he says, he wants to make it possible to open a new business in a single day.
He proposes slashing public spending — currently 50.5% of gross domestic product — to fund a rollback of Italy’s tax burden, which is one of the highest in the 15-nation euro zone.
So where does that leave the Italian right under Berlusconi?
[Berlusconi] is also proposing the same recipe for economic growth that he did when he was last elected in 2001: lower taxes and increased investment in infrastructure. Meanwhile, Mr. Berlusconi has lampooned the Prodi government’s crackdown on rampant tax evasion, claiming it was akin to a tax rise.
The Berlusconi “vision” is not very appealing, I think you’ll agree. As for Veltroni, well, the left has often embraced market-oriented reforms, whether out of desperation or liberal conviction. But Veltroni sounds like an arch-Thatcherite, far more than even Blair. I gather there’s something I’m missing here.
What you’re missing is to excise the WSJ lens from the article. The Sarkozy of the WSJ columns is to the actual Sarkozy what Hamlet’s father is to Hamlet’s uncle. Or something.
I’m no expert on Italian politics but I think the Italian left has the same problems as the French left (and the continental European left overall): young, reformist leaders who know they must embrace the market, but who are afraid to do so partly because of hard-leftist elements within their coaliltion, partly because reform requires taking on powerful entrenched interests, and also, I think, partly because the reformist Left’s embrace of the market is and has always been of a pragmatist-but-reluctant, necessary evil type: “You gotta do what you gotta do to have higher growth and higher employment”, instead of a true recognition of the goodness intrinsic to the market system.
Since their own adhesion to free markets is reluctant, their advocation of it will always be. And electoral success is a lot like romantic success: what determines whether you win isn’t so much what you say as how confident you are when you say it.
— PEG · Mar 28, 07:25 AM · #
Umm, what exactly about believing that requiring 60 permits to start a business is a bad thing, or that having over half a nation’s GDP as public spending is too much, makes one a right-winger?
I hate to shatter one of the right’s weird stereotypes about the left, but “liberal” does not equal “favors more regulation and taxes at all times, no matter how silly or what the current tax burden is”. A liberal can quite coherently believe that while the economy in Country A is overregulated, the economy in Country B is underregulated.
— Phaedrus · Mar 28, 01:54 PM · #