Nihilism and pensions
(… today I explained on Facebook a couple of things about how "er monno" works, for the benefit of the many friends – from the PD – who help us with their disinterested advice:
"Er monno de #aaaaabolidiga" works like all other worlds, like all other experiences of social life: there are phases, and there are roles. What you see "from the outside" is the declination of this simple truth, within the reach of all of you, because each of you has a social life, which goes through phases, and in which you play roles, which change with the phases. For example, in a phase like this, in which the main emergency is undoubtedly the democratic one, it is completely natural that in order to gain consensus, those who have been able to bring this issue to everyone's attention are involved with a book which in fact is a passionate and clear defense of the right to express one's thoughts. When the emergency was the economic one, five years after the ax of austerity had descended, cutting off growth, the task of putting themselves on the front fell upon economists, that was their role. Now the phase has changed. The "markets" (it would be better to say: the merchants) did not kill us, following their advice has debilitated us, as widely predicted here, but the others are doing worse and we are not under attack. The most imminent threat today derives from the fact that after his infamous betrayal, the one with which he handed over his voters to the merchants, to be crushed by these policies:
(I remember that the words are Draghi's) the left obviously finds no argumentative space outside of delegitimization and silencing in any way and at the cost of any violence from its interlocutors. All things that we have already seen here and immediately , as you will remember. But the same loss of inhibitory brakes that leads the left to speak freely about war (holy, it goes without saying) leads it not to distance itself from increasingly violent acts of squadrism: we must have no illusions, no scenario should be excluded, in the name of Europe or of Ilclima I imagine that someone can justify or advocate even the armed struggle without too many hesitations, if the good morning starts in the morning, and then perhaps it is appropriate that the attention does not just pass by, but also expands to these issues of freedom, which here they have always been central, but treated in a deliberately elitist key (graph them, 'and tables, remember? All those things that friends – from the PD, as we later understood – told me not to put, otherwise my speech it wouldn't have been engaging…).
Another example: today, like ten years ago, Claudio will be our candidate, and like ten years ago today I would repeat and repeat my identical declaration of vote from ten years ago , which, upon rereading it, it seems to me he has not lost freshness. Of course: some things have changed, that's obvious enough. In particular, I returned to my choice not to engage in a political role, despite the fact that in Italy there is, or would be, a need for an authoritative but independent and third voice, it is still completely understandable. I gave up on third party status: I traded some of the authority that came from not being a party to the proceedings for an unexpected amount of knowledge of how the machine works. In the end the exchange was advantageous, and now my role is no longer that of standard bearer, but of machine man, and I dedicate myself to that role, with discipline and self-sacrifice, against the predictions of those who, attributing to me an irredeemable narcissism, predicted my incurable inability to be in my place. The standard bearer still today is Claudio, and the choice of this role, which Claudio is fulfilling with his usual self-sacrifice and genius (see for example #ilComunepiùBorghidItalia :
It also arises from the roles that the team has assigned to us. As President of a delicate bicameral parliament, it was more appropriate for me to maintain a "low" profile, because this allows me to intervene clearly enough in institutional settings without being accused of the motive of easily gaining consensus:
and so the community lines up Claudio at the front. Each of us is committed as a team to the role – visible or invisible – that those who coordinate us assign to us. This is our strength, and the bunch of narcissistic idiots who present themselves as a "pure and hard" alternative simply lack the mass to be a team and the critical capacity to act as a team. The satisfaction of bringing what I bring to the cause every day compensates me for the frustration of not being able to spend much longer with you or of not being able to travel round Italy to collect applause – a satisfaction which, moreover, is with the intention of supporting the candidates I'm still allowing myself:
(I take this opportunity to point out the need to subscribe to the Insurto channel: Fausto is back, I got him on my voicemail, because teams work like this: no man left behind! He's helping me, and you help him by subscribing and little bell…).
The post I wanted to write to you today concerns precisely my role in the Management Bodies Commission, where tomorrow we will have the pleasure of receiving Assogestioni who will talk to us about supplementary pensions. But to get to the point I have to start from a little far away …)
A friend I care about very much reported this event to me:
urging me in particular to listen to Giorgio Matteucci's speech, which begins around minute 40 of the video. There would be many things to say, and we will say many in the next event that a/simmetrie is organizing for July 10th (with De Martin, Frezza, Tafani, and indeed also Matteucci). The point that struck me the most, of which in my opinion not even the author has fully grasped the truth and significance, is the one in which the author highlights how the perennial anxiety imposed on us by supranational " governance " of chasing a future that does not is translated into a substantial nihilism, into the denial of the value of the present, which is seen not in its actuality as the moment in which our existence is concretely realized, but only in its potential as a preparatory moment for a "better" future, which will be the true time in which it will be worth living, only to discover, once we get there, that it is another present to be denied for the sake of a further future.
This is the rhetoric of the world of education ("training for professions that don't exist yet…"), but this is, in general, the rhetoric of the left, of progressivism, which, as I told you yesterday, has gone from denial of the past in the name of "never again" (as we learned from Michéa), from the projection towards the future seen as necessarily, ontologically better than the present ("progressivism" is first and foremost this rectilinear vision of history), to a further radicalization: no longer the denial of the past because the future will be better, but the denial of the present so that the future will be better!
There is a logic in this: the rectilinear vision of history is no longer very fashionable. Not everyone is an expert in cointegration, but those who were there have no doubts about the fact that compared to the "glorious thirty" we have lost ground! The failure of our present turns against those who in the past had indicated it to us as a radiant future, illuminated by the sun of the future, and what is the obvious retaliation? Obviously that of saying that if yesterday's future, that is, today's present, has not kept its sinister promises, it is our fault: we have not sacrificed ourselves enough in the past (that is, in yesterday's present) and we are not sacrificing ourselves enough today (i.e. in tomorrow's past) to be able to aspire to what we did not deserve: a future of yesterday, that is, a decent present, and which we will not deserve: a future of today, that is, a better tomorrow.
The left thus espouses not only as a tribute, as a wergild of the pactum sceleris that binds it to big international capital, but as a dialectical tool that opens up a glimmer of survival for it, the paternalist logic of "sacrifices" that it once attributed to the hated "neoliberalism ". How to change, not "so as not to die", but during putrefaction…
Now, the problem with this futurologist rhetoric, with this anti-human and anti-humanistic nihilism (not only because nec minimum credula postero , but also because the "professions of the future" are obviously the dictatorship of STEM), is that it doesn't work. On July 10th we will see better why it doesn't work in the field of education (there is already a lot in Matteucci's speech), and here I will simply remind you why it doesn't work in the economic field.
Thinking of restoring a country's finances with austerity is exactly like thinking of inventing an elevator by putting your feet in a bucket and pulling up the handle. If you persist not only do you stay where you are, but you hurt yourself. The destruction of GDP, necessary (as Draghi says above) to recover competitiveness, is however harmful for the recovery of the accounts of any public or private operator. We saw it:
1) here with reference to the debt/GDP ratio (increased);
2) here with reference to the first social security pillar (put in objective difficulty by the decline in contribution revenue induced by the mix of unemployment and salary cuts);
and today, lellero lellero, Panorama arrives to tell us what, in some way, Assogestioni will also tell us tomorrow (and what the representatives of AEPI and Ancot told me yesterday afternoon in a private but not confidential meeting):
But look! Panorama informs us that if a young person has an entry salary of 1600 euros and lives in Milan, it is difficult for him to set aside at least 160 euros a month to build a second supplementary pension. Dr. Grazia Arcazzo , an internationally renowned economist (she teaches at Princeton) and the world's leading expert on pension systems, would be able to explain to us in great technical detail the reasons for this difficulty, for which I rely on your intuition here.
I would add that if a self-employed person has to pay minimum contributions of around 4000 euros a year (and rising) to secure the compulsory pension, it is also possible that he will not be able to set aside for the optional one.
I'll put it bluntly: they made us digest the idea that to have a decent salary you had to have two, presenting it to us under the noble guise of everyone's legitimate aspiration for economic independence and emancipation. A noble goal, which however, once achieved, would have meant that the family would earn double: instead, if all goes well, the standard of living that can be afforded by working as a couple is more or less what we had forty years ago with a single salary, or at least this is the perception (in terms of saving capacity, available free time, etc.; here there are also many sociological variables to consider, but in short let's be satisfied with the perception here too).
The idea that to have a decent pension you needed to have two was instead seasoned with the rhetoric of sacrifices and with a fraudulent narrative of what the "contributory" was: not a (funded) system, but a calculation method whose purpose was to reduce the replacement rate (the ratio between first pension and last salary), thus making it necessary to resort to the "second pillar", to be financed with what remains of an increasingly meager salary (because "we have pursued a deliberate strategy of trying to lower wage costs") net of an increasingly burdensome compulsory contribution (because the wage cut has reduced the amount of contributions and therefore the contribution rates must be raised in an attempt to bring the amount back to the previous level).
An endless spiral into an abyss of misery and despair born of ignorance: ignorance of improper fractions, as explained here .
Not only has austerity, by destroying investment, destroyed growth. Not only has austerity, by destroying growth, increased the debt/GDP ratio. Not only has austerity, by reducing wages and pensions, reduced tax and social security revenue, compromising the sustainability of future compulsory pensions. But it has also prevented the development of those pension funds, of those supplementary funded pensions, which in the advanced financial systems which in theory certain "technicians" would aspire to lead the country, are the growth engine of the financial markets and therefore, according to them, of the country's development.
The death speech of the Draghi, the Monti, the PD, is gloomily contradictory: if they wanted what they say and said they wanted, it is completely obvious, as it was then, that they should never have done what they then told us was necessary, and today they confess to us that it was harmful.
But these technical "errors", which, as you know, are not errors, but deliberate strategies of redistribution of income from small to large, would not have been accepted, or at least would not have gone unnoticed by their victims, if they had not been supported by the macabre nihilistic rhetoric of the left.
This is the political responsibility of modern collaborationists, and we will have to remind them of this responsibility in June.
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2024/05/nichilismo-e-pensioni.html on Wed, 15 May 2024 12:43:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.