First post

When it comes down to it, all of us have seen examples of State Robbery. The State, protector of all, often fails us all through its inefficiency, inadequacy, inflexibility and incompetence....

Place: Spain - that's where I live and have lived for the past 10 years

Time: 2004 - almost 30 years after Franco died... long enough for the State to get its act together

With all the hype that Spain is pushing to become the 8th largest economy in the world, I would have thought that a level of state efficiency would be one of the parameters that journalists and analysts were watching.

But no ... we're still living in a world of
a) public exams to enter the civil service (with thousands of people spending great amounts of time and money to prepare themselves to sit the exams ... in the hope that they might get a job for life)
b) jobs for life ... okay, the Spanish employment market is complicated, but can the State afford to offer lifetime security to all public servants (they can't even budget two years ahead, so why should they burden future taxpayers with thousands of public servants who may not be required tomorrow
c) no resources ... employees without computers, doctors with too many patients, not enough places in schools or kindergartens

These problems and more are not unique to Spain... and you might not think that they are equivalent to State robbery... but lets face it. Would you get away with spending money the way the State does and still have a job?

More to come in future posts