The employee Minister Tommaso Padoa Schioppa has said: “If a company remains public and gives generous dividends, but then makes us pay higher tariffs, it can benefit the accounts of the State but it doesn’t benefit the development of the economy".

Dear employee, you are right. You express yourself better than Catalano. If ENI and ENEL produce profits in a monopoly situation (a bit like stealing sweeties from the children) it should reinvest them (for example in renewable energy) and not distribute them as profits to the shareholders, one of which is the State.

Tommaso Catalano Schioppa also tells us that by privatising even a little bit, there’s the risk of a Public Purchase Offer. In simple words that means that control can pass to the hands of private interests. Something like what happened with Tronchetti. Then the monopoly goes from being public to private and the hole, not only the one in the balance sheet, gets bigger with the blessing of the banks who lend money for the acquisition by using debts. That’s how the celebrated private monopolies are born: autostradebenetton and telecomtronchetti.

Primary services: energy, transport and communications are run by the State because they have been constructed over decades using our taxes, the taxes of our parents, of our grandparents, of our great-grandparents. They are not for sale nor can they be given away. They do not belong to the government nor to Parliament, nor to each individual employee of ours in Rome. The State is us. Those services are ours. And the profits must be reinvested to make them better.

Is it so difficult to say that? Is it something that is too indecent for our full time economists? More State and less Livestock Market. The Telecom backbone must be returned to the State. The motorways must be returned to the State (what have they got to do with a market? You can’t choose between motorway routes). Everyone can play at being an economist at the expense of the citizens.