The big news in the upcoming Italian election is the rise of former comedian Beppe Grillo, whose party may finish as high as second in the voting. There is a lot about Grillo at The Corner. He sounds like a pretty typical bad-government populist; normally you would think it would be a disaster if he took power, but this is Italy, so things may or may not get worse.
What jumped out at me was this Grillo quote:
In order to remain in the euro, we are starving the country…If we had the lira, we could solve our debt problem through a devaluation of our currency.
That’s what members of the political class all over the world are thinking, but most of them don’t say it so bluntly.
