Cyprus Deposit Tax: A Hint At the Future For the U.S. and EU

The latest attempt by the desperate leaders of Europe to contain the euro crisis and to insure the banks remain solvent was a 6.75%-9.9% tax on all bank deposits. This tax has now failed to pass the Cyprus parliament and the EU and Cyprus are looking for other solutions. The tax was justified by saying that bank depositors must bear some of the burden for recapitalizing Cypriot banks. While the burden was placed on depositors, those who own bonds issued by either the banks or the government of Cyprus would have been repaid in full. This is another piece of evidence that the politicians and banksters will do whatever it takes to maintain their own financial dominance, including the direct looting of personal bank accounts.

Despite what many people believe, a bank deposit is a loan. When you deposit money in a bank, that money no longer belongs to you, it belongs to the bank. They can lend it out or use it to buy assets that they believe will generate a return. Their only obligation to the depositor is to repay the loan whenever the depositor requests his money, subject to legal limitations and the ever-present threat of a “bank holiday” or of the confiscation of a portion or the entire deposit by government action, as happened in Cyprus. As all fractional-reserve banks are by definition insolvent, all of the money loaned to them can never be paid back. When push comes to shove, someone has to lose, and what happened in Cyprus provides precedent on who the losers will be. The losers will not be those who loaned money to insolvent banks by buying their bonds, or those who bought the bonds of an insolvent government; they will be ordinary depositors and taxpayers, as usual.

The bailout of Cyprus that included the deposit tax was a creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is more proof, if more proof was needed, that the IMF is totally under the control of the international bankster oligarchy. Anything and everything will be done to insure the banks are paid back and their owners and creditors get to keep all of their money. The rest of us will not be so lucky. Cyprus is a small economy, so whatever happens to it will not have much of an impact on the larger economies of the U.S. and EU, but its very smallness indicates that economic problems effecting it today will affect the larger economies in the future. It is the proverbial “canary in the coal mine,” and what is happening in Cyprus will soon be happening in larger economies like the U.S., Europe, and Japan. The banksters control the governments of all the Western nations, and they will use that control to insure that they get their money, regardless of where that money has to come from. It will come from your bank account, your retirement plan, your investments, any source of money that is accessible to the state and the central banks.

What does this mean for the average person? It means any wealth you may have in paper assets of any kind, be they bank accounts, stocks, mutual funds, or retirement accounts, is not and cannot be safe from government confiscation. If they can prove you have it and control the means by which you access it, they can and will take it. The only protection that the average person has is to take their money out of these types of assets and buy hard assets that you personally control. Real estate is sometimes used as an example of a hard asset, and it is often a good investment, but it has the major problem of being very visible and completely immobile. Anyone who claims to “own” a piece of real estate can determine if they actually own it by refusing to pay property taxes on it. You will find out rather quickly that your “ownership” means nothing if you do not pay the state its rent. The only truly safe assets are those that you can possess without the state or anyone else knowing about it, such as gold and silver, guns and ammo, and food and water. These are the only assets that will mean anything when the larger states become as desperate as the small states are today.

In addition to protecting yourself from confiscation and expropriation, taking your money out of the financial system and transforming it into hard assets is a revolutionary act of defiance. It removes a few more grains of sand from beneath the castles of the banksters and politicians, helping to erode the system that they depend on for their power. If the people’s wealth is held in a form the rulers cannot access, their rule is that much weaker. At the very least it forces the rulers to show themselves as the brutal tyrants that they are by going after personal property held in people’s homes if they wish to confiscate their wealth, rather than being able to quietly and cleanly seize it from a bank account. Every dollar you have in the bank, especially the big international banks, is being used to prop up the banksters. If everyone removed their money from the banks, they would not only be safer, they would have struck a blow for freedom that the tyrants would never recover from. While it may be unrealistic for many people to remove all of their money from the bank, at least transfer to a local bank and hold any wealth you plan on keeping for a period of more than a few years in the form of gold and silver.

Another way of striking at the root of the bankster system is to refuse to buy into the consumerist mentality that you have to work as much as possible to earn money to buy the latest gadget. Simplify your life and work only as much as you need to in order to get by. Every dollar that you do not earn in the “above the table” economy is one more dollar that will not be taxed. Reduce your tax burden and you reduce the amount of money flowing into the state’s treasury, in addition to reducing stress on yourself and making more time for family or recreation. The modern system of control is built upon the belief that we all have to work 40 hours a week and try to make as much money as possible. The less you fit into this mold, the less control the state has over you and the fewer resources it has to exert control over others, so by rejecting the consumerist lifestyle you are not only freeing yourself, you are helping to free all the rest of the people who are caught up in the state’s web of evil by depriving the state of resources, or at least forcing it to obtain those resources by borrowing rather than taxation. The more the state has to borrow, the faster the final collapse of the expropriation model will come.

The harder it is for the state to fund itself, the more it will have to use extraordinary methods like the deposit tax in Cyprus. These methods, by their very strangeness and the fact that they affect everyone in an uncomfortable way, tend to wake up more people to the evils of statism. When enough of the population is awakened, we will have a chance for a true revolution.