Social, Economic, and Youth Programs

Abstract

During the first couple of years of Fascist rule, while Alberto De’ Stefani was Minister of Finance, the government generally pursued a laissez-faire type of policy, returning the national life insurance program and the telephone system to private hands and giving tax advantages to bondholders and industrialists. In the spring of 1925 this began to change as the government embarked on an increasingly interventionist kind of social and economic program. Count Giuseppe Volpi took over the finance ministry, while Alfredo Rocco became a key adviser to Mussolini in social and economic matters. Soon the Rocco Labor Law and the Labor Charter (printed in Chapter 3) gave tangible evidence of the new philosophy.