Do People Intuitively Seek Government’s Help During Crisis? Not in Italy

A popular notion is that the default mode by the public during an economic crisis is to seek sanctuary in the nanny state.

But that’s not what seems to be happening in Italy.

From the Dollar Vigilante (via LewRockwell.com)

This week saw the launch of a popular uprising in Sicily, by a group known as the ‘Movimento dei Forconi’ or ‘Pitchfork Movement’. This is not an uprising of self absorbed youth who want more government handouts; but of producers who are being pushed into poverty by government taxes and regulation. The organizers are middle aged and older; this is significant, as most power and wealth is held by this generation and they have now drawn a line in the sand.

On the 16th of January these protesters began "Operazione Vespri Siciliani", a blockade of the Island of Sicily. Within two days the transportation of all goods was stopped. Over the next week, nothing entered or exited Sicily. This was no mean feat given that Sicily is not a small Island; it has a population of over five million people and a surface area of 25,711 km2.

These are some of their demands:

-The arrest of all corrupt politicians.

-To reduce the number of parliamentarians.

-To remove the provincial bureaucracy, as most of these politicians have been there for over forty years.

-To drastically cut the salaries and privileges of parliamentarians and senators.

-To restrict politicians two only two terms in office

Not one of Darth Monti’s “austerity” measures has touched the political caste; in fact in classic Italian style, the press has dug up some very dirty scandals concerning two of his fellow tax-feeders.

Read the rest here

Media and mainstream education has brainwashed the public to think that we should all run to the governments to seek refuge. In reality, the state operating on self-interests, use crisis as an excuse or opportunity to exploit on people’s fears which then gives them the rationale to expand power and control over society. In other words, crisis and wars are often used to justify the state’s predatory existence in the name of security and welfare.

And when economic imbalances exposes on the dysfunctional nature or the unsustainability of such systems, popular upheavals follows. The popular uprising in Sicily, which ironically demands for the reduction of government, appears to play into such motion.

Moreover, the upheaval looks very much a manifestation of the forces of decentralization gnawing at the foundations of the industrial age welfare state.

As Law Professor Butler Shaffer writes, (bold emphasis mine, italics original)

Alternative schooling, dispute resolution, and health-care practices; political secession and nullification movements; the decentralization of management in business organizations; news-reporting moving from the centrally-controlled, top-down model of traditional media, to the more dispersed, horizontally-networked Internet; individualized technologies such as personal computers, cell-phones, iPods, video cameras, and other innovations that enhance person-to-person communication, are just the more evident examples of how our social systems are undergoing constant centrifugation. If the successful practice, in a number of European cities, of abandoning government traffic signs in favor of a motorist-controlled system does not impress you, perhaps you will recall the collapse of the Soviet Union.

To express this phenomenon in terms of solid geometry, the pyramid is being replaced by the sphere. Plato’s hierarchically-structured world directed by philosopher-kings – long the favored model of the intellectual classes who fashioned themselves fit to sit at the institutional apex – has proven unfit for ordering the affairs of human beings. It is not better ideas that are transforming how we organize with one another, but real-world pragmatism: the life system simply cannot operate on the principle of being directed by centralized authorities!

So despite the mass media indoctrination, the technology enabled and facilitated horizontal flow of information, will impress upon the public of the mounting futility of centralized institutions. And such transition will be magnified by the persistence of the current crisis which may eventually lead to the collapse of welfare states.

Also this should extrapolate to a shift in people’s expectations on the role of the state.