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Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

I live in a country (Italy) that has been crushed and whatever mission I might’ve ever had or sense of accomplishment I might’ve ever earned has been superseded by a never-ending sense of dread and struggle to not drown in a decaying world.

I have very little time for glib self-improvement or self-coaching. I’m starting to wonder what purpose all of this could possibly serve (”none at all”, comes my self-reply).

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I'm not Italian, but I love the country and have Italian cousins. These things surprised me: 1. The need for licenses to build anything. I seem to recall the figure of 100,000 euros licence to open a small chemist. 2. The need of support from the local big families for your business to thrive, ie you need to be anointed to make it. 3. The cost of housing relative to income. Who the fuck owns all the housing.

I feel sad for Italians, they are some of the best people I know.

For the Americans reading, young Italians have not been dispirited by socialism, but by rampant crony capitalism.

Relative to point (3), housing is owned by families as a method of saving because historically inflation was high and home ownership is a coveted value.

I am Italian (living abroad in Luxembourg, Singapore, United States for the last 10 years). I feel exactly like you. I lost almost any faith in our beloved Mother country to be able to emerge from the mud and be a beacon of hope and culture once again.

I also hope that in a few years, once I have satiated my appetite for career and startups and money, I will have the willingness to go back and try to apply what I have learned - although I don't believe in doing so through the political system, but rather as an entrepreneur.

This could be a much longer discussion, of course. And I'm also sure that other people from other countries feel similarly (e.g. Greeks, Portuguese, Pakistani, etc).

You’re lucky, in a sense. I have been standing and fighting in the ’mud’ for a decade because we have a family business to defend and preserve, for the benefit of my family and all those who are employed by it. It’s a totally dispiriting experience.

In a sense, I am. In another (as you probably know), it took a dose of guts to leave Italy (and friends, parents, etc).

But, I fought in the muck for 10 years before deciding it was time to leave.

Well. What to say. I still miss Italy to this day.

I come from Italy as well, and felt that sense of dread, and I solved it in the easiest way possible: I moved to another country. In Europe is really easy to move nowadays, and you can pick a well-governed state to move to :)

Are Italy's problems related to the hyper socialism in the country? It's something I have heard many Americans say about Europe.

Italy is not ”hyper-socialist”; presupposing it is merely renders conversation about the causes difficult. Rather, the country’s growth model was for decades based on a manufacturing economy whose competitiveness was sustained by progressive devaluation of the currency, for as long as one was available. Similarly, growth was funded by public debt whose affordability derived from inflation. The houses somebody mentions: those are mainly owned by the people themselves, as a manner of protecting their savings.

Italy’s been brought down not by socialism but by incomplete, inchoate, puerile mismanagement rooted in a misunderstanding in what capitalism actually is.

The countries that best embody what Americans think of as "European socialism" are actually the Nordic countries, which are relatively prosperous, innovative, and not corrupt by Western standards.

Italy, to the best of my understanding, is still a collection of unruly tribes most of which function under the "I'll take my crook over their crook" mentality, deeply suspicious and corrupt, all united by a thin layer of quasi-democratic practice (theater).

It’s easy for Americans to be misinformed as to the cause of the struggles Europe faces, and likewise for Europeans knowing the plight of Americans.

Italy is by no stretch of the imagination "hyper-socialist."

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