While it's not illegal to use offshore companies, the moment one "forgets" to mention to his friendly, local tax official about the 500 million pounds/dollars one "earned" last year, and are now hidden behind the facade of these offshore companies (that actually exists only for that sole purpose), it becomes illegal. At least in Europe.

Well, at leat for now. Our marvelous right-wing cabinet did try to make tax evasion legal, but they received enough of a shit-storm to delay the plan.

On the other hand, some (a lot?) of people now have 50% more purchasing power, and money is moving around way more than before. Which, if I'm not mistaken, will generate demand, which will generate jobs...

Way too many people nowadays believe that jobs come from letting (financial) business have a lots of money, while in the real world the jobs come from tasks that need to be done -- a.k.a. demand.

I'd rather say everyone is entitled to say things that offend me, but I don't have stay and be offended.

I mean, I do reserve the right to be offended, and deal with it the adult way. Like switch the channel, leave premises or not go to a show. Or not, if I'm enjoying at being offended...

For most parts, Finnish labour market is a about as dynamic as it is in Sweden, in some parts it's even more dynamic. This (manufactured) crisis is merely an excuse to try to lessen the power of the unions -- don't confuse dictated labour market with dynamic.

And, by the way, we here in the labour force call those "acquired benefits" actually "compensation for working".

Not really, Finland's economy is tanking because we're in the Eurozone, because our exporters decided to compete by cutting costs instead of raising quality, but mainly because of five years of continuous shrinking of national economy due to these cuts.
Just yesterday our minister of finance said that it was not a choice by necessity but by political ideology. The Finnish government is basically doing to Finland what EU did to Greece. I don't know what we did to earn such hatred from them, though.

That theory also talks about "informed actors". That is, consumers being able to get all the information -- a world without trade secrets...

My experience is very different, but probably because I had to support R users in academia. Quite often they didn't really understand either statistics or programming -- they just read an article that used some freely available R script for something similar to their studies. And they happily demanded me to solve the unsolvable dependency hells, find resources that were able to survive scripts designed for completely different size of datasets and sometimes (although rarely) to explain what the results of their run were...
In a few clear cases of attempting an statistical overkill we solved their problem with twenty lines of python and thousand times faster execution. In those cases everybody came out happier and smarter.
I dislike R because it is a resource hog, and it hides a helluva lot of things that "my users" should actually be very aware of.

Or they provide Kurds with ample amounts of air defence weapons, and Turkish air campaign "against ISIS" could start suffering casualties...

Now, how does Greece react to the new rules Turkey has regarding her air space violations? Pretty soon the re will be neither Turkish nor Greece Air Force.

GP is not asking more government, but that we, the people, use the power we have to protect ourselves against the sosiopathic corporations and individuals. Informed public is the very prerequisite of both working democracy and working markets. Centralized distribution and control of information is perpendicular to that -- see North Korea.

Me thinks GP's point was that there is none. In a sense that if there's working and affordable public transport, people prefer not to drive while intoxicated

So Francis Walsingham, SOE, MI5/6 managed to keep UK safe without massive, intrusive intelligence gathering, even though they faced actual, serious enemies of the crown, but GCHQ can do it's job without spying on everyone when the biggest threats to UK are political (and seemingly unlikely to happen, like Scottish independence or humane EU) or economic (neo-liberals running IMF, ECB and Eurogroup).

Besides, to defend yourself, you don't need that much secret information, you can get most intelligence about attitudes and aspirations trough normal channels. It's when you're about to do aggressive, undemocratic or clandestine stuff yourself, like build an empire, when you need secret and actionable information to impose your will on other people.

Since all the institutes puslishing their version of the temperature records have published the very specifics of why, how and where they have "manipulated" the records, you could start with those. If you choose instead to follow a newspaper columnist who has been caught making stuff up time oafter time, you're free to do so. Just don't pretend that you try to be objective. After all, the "alleged adjustments" are well understood and written out clearly, from the very beginning of the publishing of the temperature data. There's nothing nefarious going on, quite the contrary. In the offert of making the temperature data consinstent and comparable, that is. Mr. Booker's continous efforts to smear science and scientists, on the other hand, seem at least to me be something else than honest.

There are two problems with making Greece and example: they did not spend irresponsibly, they became insolvent only after Germany forced them to shrink their economy, and secondly, because once out of Euro Greece can pay back their loans with newly printed bitdrakhmas, and Germany will take the biggest hit of that being the biggest creditor.
Ok, three problems, since even the term "punishment" makes it also obvious that EU is not a cooperative looking for the common good of it's citizens, but tool for the German financial elite to have their way regardless of things like democracy.