The democracy is a chain: political fair play produces assurance, this one solidarity and lower social costs, untill establishing a routine that, freed by Marxian encrustations, became a dynamic modus vivendi, cultural base for economic and social reforms.
The Nobel prize winner for the economy Kennet Arrow J. devotes, in the ’74, a reflection to the “confidence” and, leaving from its nature of moral value, consisted the practical importance, that it consents to enroll it in the category of the economic goods, because, according to him, it is a lubricating main point of the social system. It is very efficient: can count on the word of the other consents to spare a lot of bothers. The confidence, and other similar values, as the reality and the truthfulness… they are some goods, commodities. They are a reality, practise, economic value. They increase the efficiency of the system, and lead you in degree to produce more goods, or more of an any value you esteem [1]. Not, then, commercialization of the values, but verification that the “right” it may produces the “good”. The Hans George Gadamer philosopher in an essay of the same year, wishes that passing through the bourgeois society will be able be transmitted to the world society of the future the cultural inheritance of the west, that today not it may some more limit to forms more or less bourgeois or little bourgeoises of enjoyment and of compensation opposite to an oppressive reality and affirms that the routine is stop and act in the solidarity. The solidarity is so the conclusive condition and the base of every style [2].
It’s bleak outlook to establish that confidence and solidarity not still become general rule, at least in Italy, prey of the corruption, that it is negative solidarity, flourished on the axis entrepreneur -bureaucrat-political, of which the Tangentopoli processes have only lifted the cover, much is that continues to rage in 2010, after years from that judicial season, that struck any final demonstrations, but not the causes, that are great many of them in the political-bureaucratic system. As long as to put a question: what need there is to corrupt the civil servants, if the civil service is correct, fluid and timely? So that in the Italian people, already sceptical for historical vicissitudes, “mistrust” is sharpened, with the social costs and inefficiencies noticed by Arrow. Since every evil produces shamen, the further risk is the Market of the prescriptions, that in political holds its exhibition, especially during elections done by empty mass media.
In such conditions wins the mistrust, that, otherwise from the prudence, is not a value. To the ablation of the “mis” it will be necessary to arrive, if we want that reforms, already abolitions of other wrong reforms, are successful. Improvement of the public expenditure, recovery of the economy, suppression of the immorality and of the corruption, reduction of the national debt, reconstitution of the spirit of national unity, consistent with a concept of correct federalism, are objectives that have any probability of realization without the recover of moral confidence as a moral value; the economic one would come consequently.
In a period, that seems to reserve a remarkable weigh to economic aspects, the economist who pay attention to the social psychology warns that the trust is a component not secondary of choices and behaviors. Monetary policy and stock-exchange markets and them variables more clear: rate of interest and of change, even it dominated by the relativity of the short term, they live on the confidence that something of predictable happens. In economy forecast is prevalent and we can notice that, if the operators, first consumers, households, the head of families, they think that something is happening, something happen really. The inflation is a classic example. If many, not necessarily all, they expect that in the next year the rate of inflation will be (x+y) in as to x of today, much probably, for a process of anticipation tied to the forecast, already today to the current rate x is added so much, that will send up to an approximate (x+y). So, not a cynical and cheat fate, not materialistic determinism does history, instead, history does it the men and not a few pages with confidence and solidarity.
The recent and still dominant economic world crisis of the 2008 is a clear and actual example of the devastating effects of lack of confidence. The monetary liquidity, already before abundant, suddenly it disappeared, but reason is known: the liquidity is mostly constituted by exchange and interbank balances, that is from exchange credits-due among banks. The first news of failures of firms of credit in the United States to the beginnings of the 2008, among which Lehman Brothers the colossus among investment bank|, it determined a such panic, that froze the interbank circulation, sending in crisis of treasury a lot of firms of credit even European, so that the Fed in the USA and the BCE in Europe were forced, to avoid the worse, to do thick interventions monetary policy to fluidize the system and recover the lost trust.
Then: it’s obvious that confidence is an economic good, but as has warned Arrow, it is not for sale, because it is the fuel of the market. How to happen for the freedom: confidence is appreciated when it is lost.
[1] “Confidence” is a recurrent concept in Arrow, that expressed it in other his texts and articles. According to he, confidence is not a good that is able is acquired easily. If purchases it, you have at once some doubt on that that has acquired. The confidence, as the loyalty or the sincerity increases the efficiency of the system but are not commodities for what the exchange in the market is technically possible or has a meaning.
[2] H.G. Gadamer, What is the praxis? The conditions of a style, in the harvest ” the reason in the age of the science “, Genoa, 1982.
