Elegy to Berlusconi

David Dayen at FDL:

Parliament under his rule served mainly to extricate him from any of a number of extra-curricular legal problems, when it wasn’t designing policies almost entirely for the benefit of his businesses. Anyone who thinks that Berlusconi will spend a minute in jail hasn’t been paying attention to how he has run the political sphere for the past two decades, quietly reducing his own exposure to prosecution.

The Prime Minister ran the country into the ground, and even under the circumstances, his exit is welcome news. Berlusconi’s unflagging optimism actually bordered on dementia: his response to the current bond crisis, initially, was that the restaurants were full, so the economy must be doing fine. The country is a mismanaged wreck, where powerful monopolies hold the vast majority of wealth, poverty rises, and protection rackets are the norm. It can be said that, at least when the entire government was under the sway of the mafia, the trains ran on time. This Berlusconi/Mafia hybrid – his ties are well-documented – was just inefficient. Growth over the past 15 years has averaged a paltry 0.75% (of course, this doesn’t take into account a very large black market economy).