What you're saying is basically true, but to make a fair comparison you need to consider that in Italy as well you need to add municipal and regional tax (which

What you're saying is basically true, but to make a fair comparison you need to consider that in Italy as well you need to add municipal and regional tax (which together are probably around 1%) and particularly that you do pay for you mandatory retirement plan - not with your taxes, but with an additional mandatory withholding that goes from 25% to 35%; plus your employer has a 5% tax on its "profits", but said profits don't consider expenses for your wage, so it's effectively a 5% tax on your wage (this is of course in addition to the regular 26% tax on company profits, from which you can discount employee wages as expenses). My impression is that the whole system is willingly structured in an overly complicated way, with taxes split between several payers and several taxable bases, so that you cannot know how much of your income are paying. Also, the taxation is really similar between employees and self-employed workers; it's just that the latter have a marginally better grasp on how much they're paying.