[Cross Posted at The Kingdom of God is Within You]
Italian Tax Evaders 2008, Romano Prodi & Silvio Berlusconi 0
The question of the breadth and power of the Italian counter-economy requires no scrutiny or test, it is well known that tax evaders, illegal immigrants, smugglers, and black market entrepreneurs alike call “the boot” a kind of safe haven where the cops are either too drunk to chase or too corrupt to care. Whether the Anarcho-Individualistic flare of the Italian people, the entrepreneurial history of the Italian peninsula, or just a general intellectual superiority that undermines the boorish slave mentality of other Europeans under the beast of leviathan, Italians do not like, consent to, or even pay their taxes! Indeed, if we Agorists are looking for a ripe country to inhabit, a model to forge a movement after, or a people to take a lesson from, we would do well to pay attention to the Italians.
In recent events, however, it seems that the Italian government has decided to cross a line – to change the rules. Posting a list of tax evaders on a website, with personal information available for exploitation in a modern age of identity theft, the Republican guard has all but declared war on the people they claim to “represent”! What an outrage! Che cazzo!
Still, however, instead of complaining about the injustices of the government playing dirty when Italians begin to stand up for themselves against their extortionists when they demand their money, what seems to be a viable solution? As an Agorist, it seems obvious develop the counter-economy past its very rudimentary stage in Italia. Absolutely, Italia’s counter-economy does not grow for the same reason that Samuel Edward Konkin III showed that the Russian counter-economy, under Communist Stalin, did not fulfill the Agorist steps to revolution – they either did not have the full revolutionary or entrepreneurial spirits about them, or they simply lived outside of the regular economy when at all expedient, returning, in mind and body, to the statist affairs as soon as their “plunder” was made. Yes, let this be a lesson to all Agorists and proto-Agorists, for in Italia, though the entrepreneurial spirit is ripe and the capacity in capital there, the pure philosophy of Agorism has not yet sunk its teeth into the Tuscan hills or the Sicilian Mountains. Yes, if only Agorism as an ideology were to spread throughout the countryside of the Italian peninsula, the opportunity for a counter-economic safe haven seems unparalleled – if any country was ready for an Agorist revolution, it would be the Southern Mediterranean nation of Italia.
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3 comments:
Brad Spangler was talking about getting the New Libertarian Manifesto translated into Mandarin on his blog. Perhaps a translation into Italian would also be in order?
That's an excellent idea. I think I may just do that.
There's also a Portugese translation.
There are two potential problems with translating NLM: style and cultural context.
Preserving Konkin's loopy energy isn't hard for someone who gets Agorism, so that's not a problem in your case. I don't know of any Mandarin-speaking agorists.
Cultural context is a little harder. Nobody outside the Anglosphere really cares about the LP, so all those references will have to be changed (maybe European "liberal" parties make a functional equivalent?).
Hopefully it can be edited to seem more revelant relevant to an Italian audience. You seem to have a good understand of the Italian situation.
One question that concerns me, and which I'm sure others will ask is "What about the Mafia?" It's possible that the popular conception of them is distorted by media and law enforcement propaganda, and that "organized crime" groups are not as thoroughly red-market as we've come to think. But to the extent that they engage in state-like behavior it's important to distant ourselves from that, or even emphasize Agorism's opposition by lumping together with the State and stating, in no less uncertain terms, that we plan on stomping them them out too, or at least defusing their aggessive practices so they're forced to come down to our level and behave like honest businessmen. Depending on how much legitimate anti-Mafia sentiment there is in Italy, such comparisons could be helpful.
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