News

Dateline: Vilnius, Lithuania

Before walking in to lunch, I stood in the small park on Vokieciu gatve in Old Town Vilnius, watching the local parking enforcer hand out tickets to cars whose meters had expired.

It’s a funny thing how government works: if anyone else came up to your brand new Volvo, tugged on the handle, took pictures of the inside of the car, and left a demand for money behind, you’d call the… well, you’d call someone.

Rightfully, you’d be upset.

Europe and the USA have become hot spots for government gone wild, yet no one seems to care. While Lithuania lacks the totally draconian government infrastructure that countries like the United States accept as normal, Europe in general has a government problem.

And if you happen to owe money to Spain’s national tax authority, you may have already found that out the hard way.

That’s because your safe deposit box is just the latest thing that is no longer safe from government theft. Spain’s tax authority has begun helping itself to belongings inside the safe deposit boxes of people they believe owe them back taxes.

Now, as much as I find taxes onerous, I encourage people to pay what they owe. The whole purpose of this site is to find legal ways to escape the draconian reach of governments that believe what’s yours is really theirs. There are legal ways to keep your own money without ending up in a cage somewhere.

That said, what Spain is doing shows just how desperate western governments are to get their hands on your money.