Feanor

I know there are places even in Europe where you earn much less than here (basically those that were behind the iron curtain). But I guess in the same time, despite general difficulties, life is less expensive. I guess for 400.000 euros in Latvia you can buy a whole building, not a small flat only. I guess that is the reason why you don't see many immigrants from Latvia here

I guess you mean the taxes. I know where that money goes, it is spent for the State machine, that basically means the salary of million public employees. It is a side effect of a State that takes care of many public services and a derivative of democracy itself. In fact the public money in democracy is often used by politicians to "exchange favors" with voters or lobbies. It happens everywhere, it gets better or worse depending of the "values" each nation has got about the behavior of the citizen as part of the national community. Italians on average don't appreciate any community above the family level, especially in the south and then there is a high level of corruption and bad management in the public offices. To give a simple example, it is quite common to see a city in the south having MANY people hired to clean the streets but then they don't go out to work (because some strange excuse like there isn't fuel for trucks) or they don't even show at work because they are doing something else. Or small towns with three times the public officers than a big city. And so on. Then there are the public companies (mail, railroads, aviation, TV, telephone, etc) that during years have always produced big debts and the State payed the debts and sometimes sold the companies (actually their infrastructures) for a little money to some "friend of friends". Managers in those public companies are hired only because they belong to some political party or they are "suggested" by some politician. Then once they are in charge they hire more "friends" whereever they can, while the ones from the previous administration are still there. You imagine what happens after 50 years of this game.

It is not an accident. In the past Italy had the biggest communist party on this side of the iron curtain. It received also big money from the KGB in some years. Today it is bigger part of the democratic party (that is a coalition of parties from the left side). The other bigger leading force was the christian party, connected to the vatican, that more or less followed similar principles but adding a much higher level of corruption. It disappeared officially around the 90s following some scandals and today it merged in both the left and right coalitions.

But even before fascism was born as socialist movement, then the idea of the State taking care of everything and all the centralization and the bureaucracy involved.

Generally speaking, all european countries have in place some level of socialism and high expenses for supporting public services. What makes the difference is while some nations have a culture of organization and good management, others (like Italy) are worse.

There are pros and cons everywhere. It is like the jokes, you don't want an english cook, a german policeman or an italian organizer.

Since I like the offtopic thing, Jews in Italy are one of the most ancient community, since they came at the beginning of the roman empire. Then the king of Israel asked the Romans for help against some neighbor, the Romans agreed and sent some troops. Israel became some sort of "ally", meaning the Romans occupied the place with military bases and asked the Jews for taxes in exchange of "protection", while leaving the king and all their political/religious organizations in place. The situation was somehow similar to today's Afghanistan and from time to time some jewish "insurgents" (fanatic religious like the Taliban in the Romans eyes) attacked an isolated Roman squad on a rocky road. The Romans did not have jet bombers so they basically adopted the usual strategy of sending an army in by feet and burn the nearest village, killing anybody by sword (or enslaving them). Then sometimes there was a major rebellion and the Romans switched from the "ally" mode to "enemy mode" that was to destroy everything standing above the ground level and make anybody slave. Among the other things, it was when the Temple in Jerusalem was finally destroyed. The perpetual disorders in Palestine (even the name is roman) made many Jews to move elsewhere and that is the reason why there are Jews community all around.

During the middle ages the Jews had some limitations like they could not own any land and they could not work in some professions. They usually lived in somehow isolated communities (ghettos).

Meanwhile Palestine had been occupied by the Arabs who took it from the remain of the Roman empire, the Bizantine. The Christians from west Europe (mostly germans like the Franks, Normans etc) then organized several military expeditions to reconquest Palestine, also known as "crusades" (but they weren't called that way back then). The Jews were caught in between the Arabs and the Christians and so probably many were forced to move again. There were also some situations when the Jews were forced on the tip of the sword to convert either to christianity or islam but they were not that common.

During time the influence of the Jews grew in Europe because some factors, among which there is good wealth on average and the tradition of reading a lot, which seems to make the Jews likely to become teachers or professors or scientists, when they don't work in banking and finance like mr. Madoff.

But then there was the beginning of '900 and the socialist-nationalist movements also known as Fascism and Nazism. During that time the Jews were considered as "enemies of the State" and basically the same limitations as the middle ages were restored. Things got worse till the extermination strategy put in place mostly in Germany and countries occupied by german troops but also in Italy, fortunately on a much smaller scale and with the usual italian "efficiency". This caused many Jews to flee to other places, like US, where apparently they had a much easier life than in Europe.

Today it seems there are about 14.000.000 Jews worldwide and 5.5 millions live in US while 5.2 millions live in Israel. In Italy there are about 45.000 Jews.

An interesting thing is the language spoken in Israel today is somehow "artificial", since it was re-constructed from the language of the Bible at the end of 1800 but it wasn't spoken by Jews already at the time of Jesus (who spoke aramaic instead).