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11A004
Theft Without End
by Jim Davies, 1/4/2011
Last month a Blog here noted that the FedGov Lies Without End, but yesterday on an inside page of the CS Monitor I noticed a breathtaking example of outright, massive theft by some governments in the Eastern part of the European Union. What they do there today, the FedGov may do here tomorrow - so hang on not just to your pocketbooks but your pensions. In the Monitor's bland and bloodless headline, "European nations begin seizing private pensions", notice first the gross error, quite typical of the major media: "nation" is used instead of "government." Neither actually exists and neither can be readily defined, but private pensions are not being siezed by "Hungary" or "Poland" or "Bulgaria" - whatever they are - but by the respective governments of those societies (whatever they are.) The Pols came up a bit short, so to help balance the books they are grabbing pension funds built up by those who prudently set something aside for rainy days. And these are countries allegedly liberated from Communism, a mere couple of decades ago. I suppose there are degrees of immorality in different kinds of theft, but few can be more repugnant than the deliberate targeting of defenseless people. Pensioners depend on the thief for their basic pension, to which he forced them to contribute, and what they chose to save up was a supplement. Now the spendthrift, dissolute politicians are taking away that nestegg and if they refuse in some way, their basic State pension will be cancelled. They are over a barrel. As well as securing the retirement of the saver, private saving brings another great benefit: it provides capital for productive enterprise. The money saved doesn't just sit there, it goes to work; attentive pension fund managers (or the saver himself) buy shares or bonds in promising, productive, profitable companies and so helps the whole economy grow. In contrast the managers of government pension schemes fritter the money away on buying votes; the US Social Security "trust fund" consists of a pile of IOUs, meaning government promises to steal from future taxpayers. So there's a quadruple whammy at work here. First government makes it very hard to save for the future. Then it wastes what would have been saved, on projects likely to win votes, so depriving industry of capital for profitable growth. Then it delivers pensions substantially lower than would otherwise have been enjoyed. Finally, just in Eastern Europe so far, it grabs anything that individuals may have saved to supplement it.
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While
awaiting the full fix - the dissolution of all government - there
is one way people can protect themselves from this plunder: save
by buying gold, a few coins a year for all one's working life.
That still doesn't put capital to work productively in business, but if properly hidden it will at least keep one's nest-egg safe from
the looters, and just look at how well its value has grown, as
shown by 
