Antonio Martino’s liberal legacy
We regret to report the death of Antonio Martino, former President of the Mont Pelerin Society, former Defence Minister (and briefly Foreign Minister) of Italy, and a good friend of the Institute.
He came from a political family: his father was Foreign Minister in the 1950s — and he would fill the same office many years later. But his first career was in academia. He studied in Chicago in the 1960s, where he met and became a friend of Milton Friedman. He went on to write a monograph on Friedman and a textbook based on Friedman’s monetarism.
Back in Italy, he became a public intellectual, writing simple, accessible and often funny op-eds in major newspapers. He introduced many ideas of Friedman’s, from school vouchers to flat taxes, into his native Italy. He spent his life promoting such proposals and strove to improve the presentation of such ideas in Italy. He created Italy’s first free market think tank, CREA, and wrote frequently for the newspapers. Though a member of the Italian Liberal Party, he said of it and others: “The parties we call liberal in Europe have two things in common. They’re not classical liberal at all. And they invariably lose elections.” In Italy’s case, the Liberals did well in 1963, when they were the only voice against the government’s takeover of the energy industry; but they moved back to consensus thinking and lost their edge.
In 1986, he ended up at a rally of Italians who were fed up with the excessive taxes in Turin. The leader of the Italian Socialist Party, Bettino Craxi, dismissed it by saying that “they’re all tax cheaters”. Martino replied: “it’s like I say all socialists are thieves”. He was ousted from the newspaper La Stampa for that.
Nevertheless, he had an arsenal of quotations and witticisms which helped him easily explain complex economic concepts to any audience. Indeed, he was a better populariser than a politician. Those who were energised by his economic arguments were disappointed by his record as Foreign Minister. He later became Minister of Defence under Berlusconi, and although it was not his natural calling, Italy benefited from his perfect mastery of English, his solid understanding of US politics and his sympathy for the aims of the Bush administration. In that role, he accelerated the transition towards a purely professional (non-conscripted) army — another cause he shared with Milton Friedman. But sadly, he was never put in charge of Italy’s Treasury, a role in which he might have done far more good.
But his honeymoon with Berlusconi was soon over. Berlusconi softened his liberal message and the party oligarchy regarded Martino’s liberalism useful in opposition but impractical in government. Martino did not leave behind his own faction in the Berlusconi party, but he had many admirers, and encouraged many others. One of his protégées, for example, is now one of Italy’s most successful TV anchors and another is an Undersecretary to Prime Minister Draghi.
In a recent interview, he commented that there are now more classical liberals in Italy now than ever — admittedly, the baseline was very low — but they are repelled by politics. One can see his point.
In the early 2000s the Liberty Fund published a collection of Martino’s essays, edited by Dwight Lee, under the title Promises, Performance, and Prospects. Essays on Political Economy, 1980–1998.
A longer version of this obituary can be found on EconLog here.