One interesting fact which emerges from the advert is that by 2009, each person working in the private sector will be paying more each month into the pension of a civil servant than they will into their own pension. That should make for an interesting election.

Should make for an interesting election. I wonder if it will.

Should make for an interesting election. I wonder if it will.

You mean the one we'll have in a couple of years for EU Regional Governor? It'll be the dullest ever. All we get to elect now are local representatives who choose a regional governor, who gets to administrate the implementation of policies from the Brussels government.

All that money in the statistics is being spent on the political apparatus of our new federal nation. It'll carry on being spent whoever is in "power" because that regional governor will have no authority or ability to dismantle it.

Won't be worth voting, really.

Not just squandered, but stolen and squandered, and inevitably squandered. There are many who agree that the state, under Labour, has squandered resources, but simply maintain that with the right people in charge, their people in charge, such squandering of resources can be avoided.

Now, having said that, I am reminded of the incentives which politicians and bureaucrats act. The uncomfortable fact is that they haven't squandered resources, but have often done precisely that which was intended, which was lining their own pockets and expanding their own power.

A resource can only be squandered relative to some goal or purpose. The mistake is to swallow whole the goals and purposes which politicians and bureaucrats explicate.

People just won't be convinced that they can do for themselves, and the state is not in the business of undermining itself by forcing people to do so. If real GDP per capita is growing, then the state should be doing less, not more.