Paid in grams: freelancers, employees and Blorfos's scales

Freelancers against employees, the 100,000-euro threshold, the strike. Grand Master Pheel weighs Italian salaries from 2000 to today in grams of gold, like Blorfos's kibble, and comes back with a doubt instead of answers.

by Grand Master Pheel — 2026-11-05

In Italy, freelancers with a small turnover can opt for the regime forfettario, a flat 15% tax on a fixed share of their income, instead of the ordinary tiered income tax paid by employees. The 2027 budget raises its ceiling from €85,000 to €100,000, and the unions have called a general strike on November 20th against the budget as a whole.

1 Dear Adept, today on this side of the screen is Grand Master Pheel, and I am writing to you from the kitchen floor, where I am weighing kibble.

2 I've been doing it every morning for ten years, ever since I adopted Blorfos (ancient Egyptian for «big pair of ears»). One hundred and eighty grams a day, divided into two meals, on a jeweller's scale I bought specifically because the kitchen one was off by four grams and I wasn't having it. The vet decided that number just once, ten years ago, and hasn't touched it since.

3 I'll come back to this shortly, because the scale is relevant.

4 Meanwhile, outside, the world is one big protest. Elections across the ocean, packed squares over here, and in good old Italy the 2027 budget law containing something that has half the country fighting.

5 The flat tax regime—15% for small freelancers—is set to apply to incomes up to €100,000 instead of €85,000 from 2027. The technical detail, which I love, is that above €85,000 standard VAT returns, because Europe decides that threshold.

6 On November 20th there is a general strike against the whole budget, and among the reasons is this: «equal income, equal taxes». On one side, the employee, paying tiered income tax up to 43% on their salary. On the other, the freelancer, paying 15% and getting called a tax evader at every family dinner. And the two glare at each other like angry dogs—an expression Blorfos doesn't deserve.

7 As the Prophet suggests in one of his Enlightened teachings (delivered over the phone before hanging up because a new episode was starting), when two poor people argue, you have to listen to both. Not to figure out who is right, but to find out who profits from making them fight. So let's follow the Third Precept and listen.

Let's start with the freelancer.

8 The freelancer has expenses the employee doesn't have: the computer, the accountant, all the social security contributions on their own shoulders, holidays nobody pays for, sick leave nobody pays for, the client who pays at ninety days if they're lucky. And the State doesn't really count those expenses: to many professionals it says «let's pretend 22% of what you earn is expenses, the rest is profit,» and taxes that.

Now let's listen to the employee.

9 The employee doesn't have an accountant, but they have rent, groceries, petrol to get to work, the dog to be looked after while they are at the office. And these are the same expenses as the freelancer, who also eats, pays rent and drives around.

10 Without those expenses neither of them makes it to work; the State counts them for neither. Then there is a third gentleman nobody invites to dinner: the company. The company pays taxes on its profit, meaning on what's left after deducting all real expenses, one by one, with invoices.

11 To sum up: the company writes off real costs, the freelancer writes off an estimate of work costs, and neither writes off the cost of living. Meaning, the human person, the one who eats, is the only one whose cost of simply existing is not recognised as a cost.

12 But the true revelation came this morning from Blorfos, in front of his bowl. I was weighing his one hundred and eighty grams and he was looking at me with the eyebrows he uses when he wants to probe my soul (or get another ball thrown). And I realised something.

Blorfos is the only one in this house who gets paid in grams.

13 One hundred and eighty grams ten years ago, one hundred and eighty today: his salary hasn't lost a thing, because a gram of kibble feeds exactly as much as it did back then. Nobody can print empty kibbles and claim they're full.

14 My salary, instead, is in euros, and someone prints euros. So I grabbed the scale and did the math for everyone, freelancers and employees alike. The method is simple, seems to work, and I'll leave it here for you.

15 One: take a figure in euros.

16 Two: divide it by the price of a gram of gold in that year.

17 Three: compare the grams.

18 In 2000, the average Italian employee earned about 21,800 euros gross a year. A gram of gold, that year, cost on average less than 10 euros. So that salary weighed about 2,200 grams of gold: over two kilos a year.

19 In 2025, the same average worker earned about 34,700 euros. More money, you might say, and indeed in euros it's 60% more. A pity that over the same period the cost of living went up by almost the same amount: a thousand euros from 2000 are worth 1,592 euros in 2025.

20 But the scale is where it gets interesting. In 2025, a gram of gold cost on average over 98 euros, and as I write to you today, we are around 118. So the 2025 salary weighed about 350 grams.

21 From over two kilos to a third of a kilo. In twenty-five years the salary, measured in gold, has shrunk to a sixth. I'll repeat that, because I recalculated it three times: a sixth.

22 And if that worker from 2000 were still paid their 2,200 grams today, they would be taking home about 260,000 euros a year right now. The freelancer grossing 100,000 euros, the one who's supposed to be privileged, is earning less than half in gold of what the average employee earned in 2000.

23 The point stands even without the gold: salaries in euros have gone up, but what you can buy with them has stayed put. And this is where the war among the poor begins.

24 Not because the freelancer steals from the employee, or the employee envies the freelancer. But because both are paid in something that gets watered down, like soup when guests arrive.

25 The Second Precept says don't bust anyone's balls, and here you have two people busting each other's balls who have lost five-sixths of their salary at the same table. Who's cashing in, meanwhile? The Prophet has been saying it for years (with a lucidity that is suspicious, given the hour he tells me): whoever prints the coloured flyers they call “currency”.

26 To see if the math holds up, I tried a simpler test with two imaginary colleagues. Gianfranco and Loredana, same office, same contract, same year: 2000.

27 They earn 1,500 euros a month and spend 1,300 to live: rent, groceries, insurance, the odd pizza. Neither ever gets a raise, for twenty-six years. The only difference is one line in the contract.

28 Same desk, same contract: a millionaire and a guy who can't make ends meet.

29 (Gianfranco and Loredana, if they existed, would have stopped saying hello to each other around 2011.)

30 Someone will say: well, gold has gone up. But since gold cannot be printed, perhaps it's more accurate to say that euros have plummeted. When we say “we can't make it to the end of the month anymore”, we blame the “cost of living”. But Loredana's life costs exactly as much as Gianfranco's. Taxes, pensions, healthcare, freelancers against employees: we argue over how to slice a cake that's melting in the meantime. And nobody goes to check the oven.

31 So I tried looking at politics with the scale too.

32 Every election campaign promises something: lower taxes, better pensions, more healthcare, more bonuses, a lower tax bracket for some and a higher one for others. On the 100,000-euro flat tax, those in government say it rewards those who work, the opposition says it rewards those who evade, and the union strikes.

33 I listened to hours of debates with an open notebook and wrote everything down: tax brackets, thresholds, tiers, who should pay more and who less. All the promises were in euros.

34 Nobody talked about the thing they pay us in, neither those who govern nor those who want to. And to be fair they couldn't say much about it anyway: currency isn't decided by Parliament, it's decided by the European Central Bank, which none of us voted for (weren't we in a beautiful democracy?)

35 So, whoever wins the elections, your salary shrinks at exactly the same speed. Blorfos, who watched the latest debate with me on the sofa, fell asleep before the rebuttal.

36 At that point I took it a step further. If everything that costs euros has to be weighed in gold, then the rum has to be weighed in gold too.

37 I did the math: if a bottle has gone up like everything else, today in gold it costs about a seventh of what it cost in 2000. Meaning, in grams, rum has never been so cheap. And the Prophet must not know this.

38 So, just to be clear: dear Prophet, if you are reading this, the math above only applies to employees and freelancers, and does not apply to spirited beverages, which for technical reasons are weighed in lire. (I realise that I've now told him rum is weighed in lire, and that in lire it costs a fortune, and that he still keeps lire in a jar. I have no idea what consequences this statement will have.)

39 The real question remains, and I don't have an answer: I just have a doubt. Central banks, meanwhile, are buying gold by the ton, and the Bank of Italy hoards over two thousand tons of it. If they hold on to it tight, it means they trust it.

40 So why does no government that always promotes itself as good and caring, and no Nobel-winning economist, propose letting us use gold as money instead of taxing our capital gains every time we sell it, when the crises that government currency was supposed to prevent seem ever more severe and destructive?

41 Maybe there is a reason I'm not seeing. Maybe the Prophet sees it, but when I asked him on the phone, the new episode of his Korean drama started. Gold, after all, actually was money, for quite a while, and at some point it stopped.

42 When, how and who profited from it is what I'll put on the scale in the next article.

In the meantime I continue to worship Anubis, confident that one day he will bring us the DogGodcoins.

43 A currency you can't touch, so no one can confiscate it.

44 That no government prints, so no one can water it down.

45 That isn't tied to anything physical, so there's no risk of someone reproducing it in a lab.

46 Until then, I'll keep telling the story of Gianfranco and Loredana every time some Dim Soul tries to convince me that the solution to poverty is asking some parasite politician to print more scrap paper.

47 May Anubis be with you!

48 Grand Master Pheel