Waiting for the 'Liberal' Revolution

“The pledge to liberalise Italy’s service industries has proved more often a campaign slogan than reality,” says the Financial Times. Yet Mario Monti’s new government has already chalked up one “revolution,” as the Corriere della Sera newspaper put it, “that puts the country ahead of much of Europe.” Read the rest to learn more about the whole thing. Meanwhile we are keeping our fingers crossed over here, because the liberal revolution—liberal in the classic sense of the word—has many powerful enemies in this country. After all, Mario Monti himself is the man who managed to bring to heel the U.S. software giant Microsoft, but was stopped in his tracks last month by Italian taxi drivers and pharmacists, as the FT rightly points out, and as all of us well know.