“One to you and nineteen to me, for I am the taxman.” That single Beatles lyric, quoted in the opening pages, sets the tone for everything that follows: precise, ironic, faintly bitter — but never resigned. Giuseppe Benedetto, who has led the Luigi Einaudi Foundation for ten years — Italy’s oldest liberal think tank, established in 1962 by Giovanni Malagodi — has not written an angry pamphlet. He has written something rarer and more useful: a guide to understanding why Italy cannot seem to change, and a serious proposal for how it might. All of this in fewer than three hundred pages, with the candor of someone who knows the subject well and the patience of someone accustomed to speaking to a country that would often rather not listen.

The book is titled Liberal is (buy here), and its subtitle — Preaching Uselessly — is at once an act of homage and a provocation. The reference runs in two directions: to Valerio Zanone’s celebrated decalogue, delivered at the PLI congress in Florence in 1981, and to Luigi Einaudi‘s “useless sermons” — that collection of essays from 1956 in which the economist-president lamented that reason, in Italy, invariably arrived too late. Benedetto knows he is placing himself within an uncomfortable tradition. Classical liberalism — the liberalism of individual freedom, the limited state, and personal responsibility — has never felt entirely at home in this country, caught as it is between a statist left and a clientelist right. And yet, he argues, it remains the only perspective that actually works.

The first part of the book, titled Lo Stato senza senso (The Senseless State), is a structured and thoroughly documented indictment of the Italian tax system. The effective tax burden exceeds 47 per cent of GDP; an Italian company pays an average of 59 per cent of its profits in taxes, contributions and assorted charges, compared with 25-30 per cent in the United States, Ireland and Switzerland; the tax wedge hovers around 47 per cent, meaning that an employee who costs a company two thousand euros takes home just over one thousand. Benedetto does not simply denounce these figures — he uses them as leverage for a deeper argument: Italy’s problem is not that the state collects too little, but that it spends too much, too badly, and with no accountability to anyone. Taxation, in the Einaudian vision that runs through the entire volume, is a necessary evil — legitimate only when it funds genuinely indispensable services and respects the principles of fairness and proportionality. When it mutates into “deferred taxation,” as public debt inevitably does, it becomes an intergenerational transfer of irresponsibility. Every promise is public debt, the author repeats like a mantra. A simple, almost obvious phrase — and yet, in a political system built on permanent promises, it lands like a provocation.

The second part — Le Regioni senza ragione (The Regions Without Reason) — is perhaps the most original and the most courageous. Benedetto devotes dozens of pages to dismantling the myth of Italian regionalism, armed with an unusual weapon: the words of Giovanni Malagodi himself, spoken in 1962 and 1963, before the regions had even been established. “They are a serious threat to the unity and efficiency of the Italian state. They are a bad idea politically; economically, they mean creating another layer of bureaucracy and spending colossal sums.” Malagodi was right at the time. Benedetto shows he was right about the future, too: regional health debt in 2023 stood at roughly €11.39 billion, amounting to 30 per cent of total regional debt; and that same year, according to the National Agency for Regional Health Services, interregional patient mobility generated €2.88 billion in financial flows. The National Health Service, formally universal, has become in practice a geographical lottery: the same disease, treated differently depending on one’s postcode. Not by fate, Benedetto argues, but as the accumulated consequence of political choices that layered twenty regional health systems on top of a national one, multiplying bureaucracy, duplication and inequality — without any corresponding gain in efficiency.

What sets this book apart from the vast Italian literature on national decline is that it refuses to stop at diagnosis. Benedetto points to a specific solution: a streamlined constituent assembly to reform the second part of the Constitution, leaving its foundational principles intact. The idea is not new, but Benedetto moves beyond the theoretical: the constitutional bill drafted by the Einaudi Foundation has already been filed in the Senate by Action party senators Carlo Calenda and Marco Lombardo. It is a concrete act, not an intellectual petition.

In the book, the author also invokes the constitutional reform on the separation of judicial careers — approved by Parliament in 2025 — as evidence that unpopular battles can be won. The confirmatory referendum of 22 and 23 March 2026, which rejected that very reform, would seem to prove him wrong on the specific case. But perhaps right on the broader one: the “useless sermon” of the subtitle is not merely an Einaudian allusion — it is a diagnosis.

The preface by Carlo Cottarelli — economist, former spending review commissioner, and a figure who has long made budgetary rigour his calling card — is the book’s shrewdest editorial choice. Not because Cottarelli endorses every one of Benedetto’s theses, but because his presence signals that the questions raised are serious and cut across political lines: in the first twenty-five years of this century, Italy ranked 170th out of 182 countries in per capita income growth, and official forecasts for 2026-2028 project annual GDP growth of no more than 0.9 per cent. We have, Cottarelli writes, “institutionalised the zero point.” Benedetto adds the question that public debate almost always avoids: who has the courage to run for office promising not a citizens’ income, not early retirement, but genuine bureaucratic reform and cuts to unproductive spending? And, above all, would Italians actually vote for them?

Liberale is, in the end, a double book. It is a cultural survival manual for those who believe in individual freedom in a country that tends to prefer collective protection and state paternalism. And it is, simultaneously, a manifesto for political initiative — one that does not merely describe an Italy that is not working, but wagers, with arguments, data and legislative proposals, that a different Italy is possible: “more sober, more just, freer,” as the back cover puts it. Benedetto knows he is preaching to an unwilling congregation. He knows it, and he preaches anyway. At a time when politics has given up even the pretence of reform, that alone is an act of responsibility. Indeed, of courage.