American independence was about a lot more than just taxation. Likewise so is Catalonia’s independence.
As to your argument about representation the Catalan point of view is that the majority of Spain levies taxes on them, they have to pay, and the rest of Spain reaps the benefits.
In the USA due to the fact that people can write off their state taxes then the result is that families like my own who live in low-tax states are subsidizing the frivolous spending of high-tax states like California and New York. How am I represented in that arrangement? I live in Wyoming and I’m being made to foot the bill for California’s high speed rail, free education to illegal aliens, gun control, and etc.
The Catalans are leftists. True. But that doesn’t lessen their right to be free of a central government that bleeds them to eternally subsidize the rest of the country and the Madrid regime.
“The Catalans are leftists. True. But that doesn’t lessen their right to be free of a central government that bleeds them to eternally subsidize the rest of the country and the Madrid regime.”
It’s debatable whether Catalunya subsidizes the rest of Spain. The debt markets subsidize Spain, which has a national debt roughly the equivalent of its GDP. Catalunya has long championed loose national fiscal policy. When they reap what they sow (crushing debt and economic stagnation due to, among other things, socialist intervention in markets), they demand a fresh national start, presumably without any of the burdens they hoisted on the “Madrid regime” as you call it.
I would say its not unlike a marriage in which the wife was a profligate spender and while the husband fought it for awhile, in reality, he wasn’t too disciplined either and loved to party, so he went along with the lavish lifestyle. At some point, the wife decides she was out bc he’s holding her back... and, although she has a job too, she demands that as part of the divorce he has to take all of their marital debt with him.
If they could work out a solution on that issue, then so be it. Let the leftists alone. They’re just acknowledging the reality that with the EU, there’s really no good end game for sovereign nations so you might as well go that party single.