Draconian rules of Italy

This article is from the Trumpet magazine;   Italy is restricting how much people can pay in cash and monitoring those crossing the border, in order to fight tax evasion.Since December 4, Italians have not been allowed to pay more than €1,000 in cash to anyone. Previously, the largest allowed cash payment was €2,500. Credit card companies and banks must report any card transactions of more than €3,000 made by their customers to Italy’s Revenue Agency. Italy is even trying to stop people driving out of the country with their money. It’s recently posted dogs trained to smell bank notes at its border crossings. Cameras and computer systems keep track of those crossing into Switzerland. Italy does need to solve its tax evasion problems. But an unelected government introducing draconian rules should get people worried—even if it seems to have a legitimate excuse. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi warned last year: “There’s a real danger of crossing over into a fiscal police state.”

The European Union is moving toward an authoritarian government, and the financial crisis is helping it do it. Several solutions put forward to the crisis—such as a nation leaving the eurozone—would probably require military involvement. If Greece were to leave the euro, for example, it would have to be done without announcing it beforehand. Citizens would have to be forced, probably at gun point, not to withdraw all their savings from the bank. No one would want to keep their savings in a currency that the government plans to deliberately devalue.

Simply put, European governments may attempt to stop the crisis by taking away the freedom of individuals to decide what to do with their own money. This is what is meant by the less-threatening sounding term “introducing capital controls.” We can see this attitude already in their attack on the rating agencies—an attempt to curtail free speech to help the euro. Eurocrats value their project more than the freedom of Europe’s citizens. Watch for governments to become more authoritarian across the Continent as the eurozone struggles to get control of its currency.