[klokoman]

Taxes and bureaucracy and crony capitalism are really high. The State and political parties also have a great propaganda machine in place and blame everything on tax evasion (it starts in school with specially designed cartoons [1]. Truth is that with a real tax rate that goes from 70% to well over 100%, only those who evade taxes or practice crony capitalism can survive.

But even despite this the tax evasion rate is really low in rich areas, even if you take into account the rate given by official stats (which are probably fake since those who made the stats need tax evasion to appear high in order to justify the persecutions of entrepeneur), while is a little higher than EU average in poor areas where people either eat or pay taxes (and in Italy there are no food stamps no real welfare for the cronically unemployed).

Also we had hundreds of capable entrepeneurs who were brought to suicide by State persecution, with illegitimate request of money from various government body.

Also, another fun thing is that if you are persecuted by our equivalent of the IRS you can go to a special court, where the judges are people who used to work for the IRS equivalent or similar institutions designed to persecute business (not exagerating). Despite this the IRS equivalent still loses over 50% of the time [3] because it asks for money it shouldn't even in light of our anti-business laws. Just recently they have been found out while bringing fake documents in court [2].

But that's nothing but a hint of the terrible tax situation in Italy, so there you have it

[1] https://goo.gl/images/VjFqaB [2] http://www.ilgiornale.it/news/politica/altro-che-fisco-amico... [3] http://www.linkiesta.it/it/article/2012/03/20/contenziosi-co...

[peoplewindow]

Such high taxes and levels of corruption are hard to describe as "capitalism" of any form. Those are attributes much more associated with communism.

I would note that the EU's Vice President and head of foreign affairs is an Italian woman ... and former member of the Italian communist party.

[klokoman]

Yes, in fact I was talking about crony-capitalism. Also consider the fact that Italy is the country where a communist party got the largest share of the popular vote, ever.

But fun thing is that after ww2 many communists in Italy didn't really like economic central planning bcause it felt too fascist. So, they were communist but they didn't practice communism to the full extent. Italy also used to have classical liberals like Einaudi who even became president for many years, and kept politics in check. Sadly, I noticed that we are moving towards statist ideas more and more, with people expecting the State to solve everything and regulate all aspects of life. It's scary. Even people like Berlusconi or Salvini, while right wing, still have a lot of statism in them, even considering just what they appear to be.