Putting Out Fires, Or Maybe Not
Place Beauvau: not the Parks Department
Part of “Upper Italy” was in Paris not long ago doing, of course, important things. Some of these had to do with restaurants and eating out, which is why at a certain point of a certain evening we found ourselves strolling around the VIIIe arrondissement, à coté du Palais de l’Élysée, where we pretty naturally ran into “Place Beauvau,” the elegant if slightly menacing venue in the snap above.
On being told that it was the Ministère de l’Intérieur, an American with us took a look and observed – correctly – that the Secretary of the Interior in Washington doesn’t get anything of the sort. He or she indeed does not. It was a kind of shit thing to do, but you can’t have countrymen going around thinking a European Minister of the Interior basically runs the Parks Department, so we helpfully explained that in euro nomenclature these are the second most important people after whoever is actually governing the country: the Minister of Police, the person in charge of Public Security and many other things.
In the French case, the many other things further include – beyond the “secret” and the “public” cops and their armies of snitches – governing the country’s overseas territories, regulating religious activities, anti-terrorism, handling firefighting and civil defense, managing elections, bugging telephones, checking up on foreigners in the country, guaranteeing the “objectivity” of newspapers and taking care of just about any other thing that might get up the nose of the people running the place, especially the “dirty” stuff.
The Ministry of the Interior, in other words, is something that you on the whole really don’t want to have that much to do with. It is the scary Ministry and it matters a whole lot.
We assume – or a least hope – that our readers are now more or less used to Upper Italy’s wandering, “sneak up on it from behind” preambles. Today’s weaving around is really designed to make you understand that Ministers of the Interior are extremely important people who do not – cannot afford to – make ill-considered public remarks.
Here is what Mr. Giuliano Amato, Italy’s Minister of the Interior, had to say the other day – to the newspapers – with regard to the financial management of a not insignificant part of the world for which he is responsable: “At this point, I advise firefighters to pay for the gasoline for their trucks rather than the rent for their fire houses because gas station owners would tell them to go to Hell (if they didn’t), whereas their landlords might not evict them. I know that it is difficult to advise this, but with things as they stand…”
We have – (here) and (there) and (elsewhere) – already touched on the subject of what it might be like to run a “modern” country with no cash on hand, but you may have thought we were exaggerating. We were not, and things are only getting worse. Italy is a rich nation with very high taxes, but it has reached the paradox described by Alexis de Tocqueville, who, writing in the 1830’s about the then recently born United States and its form of representative democracy, observed that everything would be fine until the country’s governors fully realized that they could bribe the electorate with its own money.
Italy’s political class is astonishingly rapacious, but even what it carries out the back door is small change compared with what the State gives to selected parts of the public to purchase their support. This can take the form of the generous conditions afforded to the huge class of public employees, of many kinds of unfunded pension plans, of financial aid to the Catholic Church, of subsidies to this and that industry or sector of the economy, of pointless public works, sponsored cultural or sporting activities and so on.
Not enough can be removed from the pockets of the general population to pay for all this, which is exactly why the national debt is now at about 105 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. The proportion is, after a pause, again slowly growing as successive weak governments attempt to purchase their survival.
What this all means, and what Amato’s words reveal, is that the country’s tax revenues get spent largely to purchase the consensus of the governed – and there is just not enough left over to actually do much of anything useful, like put out fires.
Depending on where you are, you may feel some sense of superiority on reading this. That would be a mistake. Italy is just a little further along than your own country.