Giovanni Birindelli (guest lecturer)
Protectionism: Economics, Philosophy and (Individual) Way Out of It
Università degli Studi di Milano
Dipartimento di studi internazionali, giuridici e storico-politici
Corso di Economic Geography (Prof. Alessandro Vitale)
12/15 maggio 2017
(Published also on Mises Canada, here with some additions)
Dear Mr. Damon (I like you: can I call you Matt? You’ll never read this anyway, so I’ll call you by your first name).
So, dear Matt, Continue reading
Pubblicazione in inglese, da parte di Mises Canada, dell’intervento di Giovanni Birindelli alla conferenza Interlibertarians 2016 (Lugano, 20.11.2016): https://www.mises.ca/ideas-of-law-and-intellectual-isolation/
GIOVANNI BIRINDELLI, 23.10.2015
(Original publication: Catallaxy Institute)
Giovanni Birindelli’s lecture at SRH HOCHSCHULE BERLIN, 23.10.2015
(high resolution here: Law, Money, Banking and the Business Cycle .pdf)
GIOVANNI BIRINDELLI, 30.6.2015 Publication in English: Mises Canada: https://mises.ca/posts/articles/glenn-greenwald-and-civil-libertarians-double-paradigm-syndrome/
Pubblicazione dell’articolo di Giovanni Birindelli in inglese su Mises Canada:
GIOVANNI BIRINDELLI, 4.5.2014
(English translation of the lecture which took place at Liberi Comuni d’Italia – Siena, Italy, 4.5.2014)
Decadence manifests itself in an extremely real, concrete, tangible way: an entrepreneur committing suicide, a company closing down, a person losing a job, a family not managing to make ends meet, an olive grove being abandoned to itself. Therefore, it is instinctive and even reassuring to try to counter decadence in an equally real, concrete, action-oriented manner while, at the same time, avoiding and even making fun of philosophical chatter. However, even though the decadence we are seeing manifests itself in a very real and concrete way, its ultimate cause is purely philosophical: it consists of the abstract idea of law which, in the Italian case, has been imposed by the Constitution. Continue reading
GIOVANNI BIRINDELLI, 3.12.2013
(Original publication: Mises Italia, Mises Canada)
A recent editorial by Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has spurred me to illustrate a proposal to reduce the public debt put forward by Professor Huerta de Soto. Since Alesina and Giavazzi’s article is the same old statist story, discussing it would be a waste of time and space were it not for the fact that it so perfectly represents the non-thought of those statists who consider themselves and inexplicably are considered to be ‘liberals’ because they are in favour of ‘privatization’. Huerta de Soto’s proposal is not immune from criticism, but it offers an opportunity to see what it means to think in economic terms outside the intellectual boundaries imposed by political power (in other words, what it means not to be a megaphone for the regime); what it means to reason about problems in terms of their structural causes rather than their effects; and finally what it means, in this intellectual desert of the so-called “élites”, to have ideas. For these reasons, and because overall I consider it to be a good proposal (though improvable), I think it worthwhile to call attention to it and discuss it. Continue reading
GIOVANNI BIRINDELLI, 30.11.2013
Speech at the conference Interlibertarians 2013, Lugano (Switzerland) – Published by Interlibertarians, Movimento Libertario
GIOVANNI BIRINDELLI, 7.6.2013
(Original publication: Ludwig von Mises Italia)
1. The free market and interventionism are processes, not states
Fighting for the free market without simultaneously fighting for the philosophical idea of law on which the free market is based, and therefore against the philosophical idea of the law that renders interventionism possible, is a largely useless effort. Continue reading
GIOVANNI BIRINDELLI (12.5.2013)
(Original Italian publication, 20.4.2013: L’Indipendenza, Movimento Libertario – Catallaxy Institute)
“Banking secrecy has had its day,” declared Pierre Moscovici, the French minister for the economy, in support of the attempt by the governments of ten (for now) European countries to put in place, “possibly within the year,” as the La Stampa newspaper reported, “a multilateral platform for the automatic exchange of bank account information which will make it possible to effectively curb tax evasion.” The history of principles that have ‘had their day’ is a long one and it invariably marches to the beat of the States’ ever-increasing need for cash.
GIOVANNI BIRINDELLI (26.1.2013)
(Original Italian publication: Movimento Libertario, L’Indipendenza)
The modern (or totalitarian) State is founded on two frauds: the fraud of law and the fraud of money. The wielders of political power have replaced the law and money with things they called by the same name but which have nothing at all to do with them. These two frauds paved the way for totalitarianism, both the ‘old’ (nazism, fascism, communism) and the ‘new’ (contemporary social democracy). They have destroyed the market economy and created long-term economic decline, all for the benefit of those in power (the so-called political caste) and, in the short term, of those who allowed the caste to buy them off (with money expropriated from others) in order to obtain specific privileges.
