Observation #2 – Is it a hollow policy? I think yes.

On the TV news today whole sections of the program are taken up by discussion of the current social situation. We only catch portions of what is being said, but basically there we strikes against the government’s austerity measures in 54 cities in Spain yesterday. Everybody in the U.S. sees blips of them on TV news, but what you are not likely seeing is that Catalunya is agitating for independence from Spain. Catalunya is centered on Barcelona, and the disconnect here is that Catalunya is a very rich province so they are agitating to keep their riches at the cost of all of their less prosperous Spanish neighbors. So much for socialist brotherhood, it is the same thing for the Basque region, they are a rich region and they are tired of paying for their poorer cousins. It is true that Spain has almost always been a confederation of semi-independent regions but breaking it up would certainly entail major social upheaval. New borders would be erected to keep out the riffraff from the poorer provinces etc. You can see where this is going, likely a new Spanish civil war. It’s much more convoluted that this but I want to give a ‘viajero’s’ view.

In my opinion, as a society we need to take care of those people who are really on the bottom of the heap, but if everybody is on some sort of welfare then we all sink to the bottom instead of rising to the top. There should be no room for corporate cronyism and corporate welfare but there needs to be a balance that doesn’t kill the golden goose either. Nuff said