Italy's horse of a different color

  Assertions, assumptions and problems behind inheritance taxes Italy has been plagued this week, as it is periodically, with a flurry of proposals to increase/alter inheritance taxes. It's like living in a country plagued with locusts: you can quietly till your land for between three and seven years, then something inexplicable happens and the cloud you see looming in the distance is not a summer thunderstorm, and it buzzes. This time, the starting shot was given by Mr. Letta, the current Secretary of Partito Democratico, ( PD ), who went public saying that he wanted an increase in inheritance taxation in order to finance some kind of handout to young people, like ten thousand EUR per young person. He was promptly stopped By Draghi in a presser, who said, and I quote, “in a recession we give money, we don't take it”. But amazingly, that wouldn't have been enough to have me write down something. What bugged me into writing this was an interview to La Stampa by Vincenzo V...

  You are kindly required to concentrate on the irrelevant This weekend papers in the EU are chock full of highly placed figures calling for suspension of EU budget rules, but don't be fooled: it never was material to the situation, and neither it is now. I open the papers, and  there is a recurring theme: EU elites want a more extended period of budget rules suspension. European Commissioner Gentiloni first, President Macron , and also German figures, like Co-founder of the G-20 Eichel, are keeping up the pressure with a view to keeping the German High Court from taking an axe to a “World without end” where unchecked deficit allows a political class to spend freely on their goals with no regard to a functioning market economy. However, as much as we can delude ourselves, those budget rules (deficits under 3% and a goal to go back to 60% debt/GDP over twenty years) were NEVER intended to accommodate a market economy at all, far from it. They were a “payment for servi...

  The reverse Arthur C. Clarke conundrum The late Arthur C. Clarke once wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Modern governments have twisted and turned that on its head, and are working according a new law: “Any sufficiently fudged set of regulations is indistinguishable from Technology” If you listen to the authorities' spiel, you come away convinced that in Italy all actions taken by the government on COVID have been carefully crafted according to “science”. Now, before some “Breaking Bad “ fan shouts out something embarrassing, let me say that this has not been limited to Italy: the strange interlude between EMA and the national medical authorities on the Astra Zeneca Vaccine side effects is no different than the alleged interplay between insiders at the WHO and Italian government official on the Report on pandemic plan effectiveness in the Italian case. Moreover, the fudge between politics and scientific principle is also ...

 CRY HAVOC This article was first published in Intelligence Quarterly: https://www.intelligencequarterly.com/2021/03/cry-havoc/ Why do people compare COVID with war, and why is that wrong? In Italy, partly due to the fact that the present COVID tzar is a military man, some people  in the ruling classes have started uttering that “Covid is like a war”. Now, I served for my rather uneventful year as a conscript, albeit in the Carabinieri, which meant police/public order duties, and while there are a lot of Veterans in America many of which I follow and admire, let me venture out on a limb and say that “Covid is like a war” is [$%&£&%] wide off the mark. Partly I can understand the sentiment. The “wars” that the western world has experienced were since 1945 far away things. While Eastern Europeans paid in blood and tears their subsequent attempts to throw the Communist yoke, the thing was and is sheepishly ignored by the glitterati. So, the...

Long life to the British Imperial Army!  Or, what's the EU doing?   In the Malay States  they have hats like plates  that the Britisher won't wear  [“Mad dogs and Englishmen”, by Noel Coward]   No, not for how they managed to keep together the biggest and more extended empire that the World had ever seen. If anything, the Navy was the real glue, and the story of the Royal Navy and the Commonwealth Navies is a fascinating subjects, and HRH Prince Philip was an accomplished and highly regarded Naval Officer.  They were a small lot anyway, numbering at the height of British power, shortly before WW I, in the region of 200.000 men. Local militias supplied most of the manpower, usually. No, I am celebrating the British Army because given the economic and political situation in the EU, and the response to COVID, it looks as if the European Elites have taken the Old officer corp traditional toast, the one that resonated from the humid jungles of Bengal to ...

  The Crisis that never was – An Italian perspective Originally hosted on "Intelligence Quarterly", https://www.intelligencequarterly.com/2021/02/the-crisis-that-never-was-an-italian-perspective/ Covid notwithstanding, I believe that the authorities do not yet appreciate the extent of the crisis now facing the EU.....they will, but we are not there yet. One of many things about Europe that irritates me, during such uncertain times, is how LITTLE we have changed the way we do things, given the scale of the problems facing the broad populace. No! This is not a particular gripe against the Draghi government, it goes way deeper and way beyond the Italian borders. It comes, in part, from my years of history fandom. Above all military history: War is the ultimate discoverer of real truth.  It is a terrible master  that like Atropos [1] , cuts the life of unsuccessful ideas short. Think Maginot line. Up until 1940, France had a perfectly reasonable strategy going forward,...

  Italy: the listing ship We have had the new Prime Minister for about a week now, albeit still waiting for the confidence vote, and I realized talking and interacting with “them forringers” that Italy is still quite misunderstood. Really, it's one of the reasons for this blog, closely linked with my passive-aggressive rage at thinking that down the road, the same people destroying my country would absolve themselves publicly saying “Who could have seen that coming?”. So, while I hope that our new government proves to be able to redress our trouble and set Italy on a path of recovery, It is useful to give what my frame of reference is to interpret Italy's story so far. Imagine, if you will, a tall ship, similar to the Cutty Sark currently displayed at Greenwich. 1 At some point, going towards the Cape of Good Hope en route to the UK, you spring a leak. You start listing to port, but as long as the ship is underway briskly and not too much water has entered the bilge,...