The Vincenzo Scoppa Foundation commemorates the fifteenth anniversary of the naming of a street after Ludwig von Mises in Soverato: an extraordinary event celebrated on 20 November 2010 during Mises’ Day, on a day characterized by an authentic parterre de roi of institutional, academic and cultural personalities and a climate of intense emotional participation. The ceremony was attended by the mayor of Soverato Raffaele Mancini, the councilors Maurizio Gioviale and Antonio Rattà, the scholars Lorenzo Infantino, Carlo Lottieri and Alessandro Vitale, the senator Natale d’Amico, the publisher Florindo Rubbettino, the journalist Leonardo Facco, the artist Angela Fidone, the president of the Catanzaro Chamber of Commerce Paolo Abramo, the director of Free@mind Maurizio Bonanno, as well as Sandro Scoppa, president of the Foundation, promoter of the initiative.
That choice was then innovative and courageous: for the first time in the world a street was dedicated to the great Austrian economist and social scientist, a symbol of the centrality of the person, of individual responsibility and of the limits of public intervention. In a Calabria often burdened by bureaucracy and constraints, via Mises represented a strong message: growth does not arise from the multiplication of controls, but from freedom of initiative.
Today, in a Europe marked by new obligations, pervasive regulations and an increasingly extensive apparatus, that gesture appears even more relevant. The cities of the South, already marked by structural delays, feel with particular intensity the weight of complex procedures that slow down investments, work and innovation. Via Mises, on the contrary, reminds us that development arises when power is limited and leaves room for people’s creativity.
The Scoppa Foundation highlights the relevance of the meaning of that dedication, which continues to recall the value of individual choices and the decisive role of personal freedom in the development of a community. Fifteen years later, the naming of the Soverato road also reminds us that progress does not arise from the accumulation of constraints, but from trust in people’s ability to direct their lives and contribute, each according to their own experience, to the growth of the territory. It is a call that remains alive even now, in a context in which the expansion of regulations and controls risks restricting the space for initiative, suffocating the very dynamism on which all lasting prosperity depends.
As Mises himself underlined, “Both force and power are powerless against ideas”: a phrase that perfectly summarizes the spirit of the 2010 dedication and the message that it continues to convey. Via Mises thus remains a cultural and civil reference point, an invitation not to forget that a society grows when it recognizes the primacy of the individual and when it does not allow constraints to transform into obstacles to creativity and personal responsibility.