We had a very nice extended family dinner this afternoon at a local hole-in-the-wall restaurant called the Niu Toc, which is not bad if you happen to be in Gracia. It's on Plaza Revolucion and gives customers a good quality-price ratio. As the local vegetarian, I had a large salad with brie, pinenuts, walnuts, dates, and stuff like that, and then roast vegetables with a bit of romesco sauce. I would have liked a few more asparagus, they were good. The carnivores had salmon with dill, fideua, which is like paella with noodles instead of rice, and squid for the first course, and then a choice between a steak or salt cod a la llauna, which is like a tomato and red pepper sauce. Had some decent local red wine and some pretty good cava, too. A good time was had by all--there were some 35 people there. Cost €23 each. Not bad at all.

I don't know what it is that makes people want to commit gratuitous violence. I suppose if I did I'd probably already have won the Nobel Prize, since I don't think anyone else does, either. Still, stories like the kids who torched two homeless people in Segovia just make me sick. How low do you have to be to abuse those who are helpless before you?

There seems to be a good bit of overreaction around here to the use of the word "nation" in the new Catalan statute of autonomy. Folks, it doesn't say anywhere in the statute that Catalonia now has the right to declare independence or anything like that. In fact, the word "nation" isn't used in the body of the statute at all, which is the legally binding part. It is used in the preamble, which is not legally binding.

The deal made on the statute seems fairly sensible to me. The Cataloonies' most outrageous demands were shot down in the end. Catalonia will have more autonomy than it used to from the central government, but the central government will continue to be THE government. I actually think they finessed the term "nation" quite reasonably, letting the Cataloonies get all excited because an official document calls Catalonia a nation, which is incredibly important to their self-esteem. But nothing legally binding calls Catalonia anything but an autonomous region of Spain, so there's nothing anyone could use as a precedent in a hypothetical court case. Problem solved, nobody gets hurt. It's a silly problem anyway.

I actually prefer government to be as localized as possible, and I think it's a great idea to decentralize, to give all the power possible to the municipalities. What they can't handle, put in the power of the regions. And the central government should only handle what's too big even for the regions.

The PP and other Spanish centralists, including most of the PSOE and most of the Communists, don't agree with me. They think governmental powers should be concentrated at the central government level. That's fair enough, I think, though of course I don't agree; still, it's not an unreasonable position.

The Catalan nationalists don't agree with me, either. They want to see a centralized government, too; they just want it centralized at the regional level. They don't want to devolve power to municipalities or other hypothetical local government bodies such as water or fire or school districts. They want the Catalan government in Barcelona to run everything.

Hidden behind all this is the old Madrid-Barcelona rivalry. Of course Madrid interests want to see as much power brokered in Madrid as possible, and of course Barcelona interests want to take away as much of that power as it can and broker it all by itself. That's highly simplified, of course, but it's the answer to a lot of questions in Spain.

Actually, the Zapatero administration seems to be doing a tolerable job on the economy. Spain ran a budget surplus last year, which is always a good thing, and Solbes just promised to hold spending below the inflation rate. He also publicly recognized, completely correctly, Spain's two major problems: the trade deficit and inflation, and correctly attributed them largely to increased domestic consumption. People are buying lots more stuff than they used to and Spanish people are much better off materially than they were when I came here nearly 20 years ago. I think this is good. I'm not quite sure why it's happening, though.

Here's where I start getting lost economically: seems to me that increased domestic consumption is also the key to economic growth, and if we take measures to decrease consumption, which I assume would mean hiking interest rates while maintaining the money supply, won't that torpedo growth as well? Also, it seems to me that the spiking of energy prices has had a good bit to do with inflation in general, as well as the increase in the trade deficit, and it might be wise to remember that energy will get cheaper.

The ministry of industry has just hit butane users with a 10% increase; about 30% of Spaniards depend on butane to cook, heat water, and heat their homes with space heaters. These folks are generally pretty working-class, and the price hike will hurt them a little. Yes, the Spanish government regulates energy prices. Though this country is a lot more market-friendly than it was before Aznar, it's still nowhere near as free-market as it might be.