FutureMoneyTrends.com: Greetings and thank you for joining us at FutureMoneyTrends.com. I'm here with John Rubino, Dollarcollapse.com. I recently read an article that he actually posted on his site and also that hit on ZeroHedge. Thank you for joining us today John.
John Rubino: Oh hey Dan. It's great to be back.
FutureMoneyTrends.com: Alright John, so in your "They're coming for your savings" article, he started off with governments that are under pressure become thieves and today's governments are under a lot of pressure. And I'd like to go over just a few of these things you said. You talked about ancient Rome, and maybe take us all the way to the mid-1940s.
John Rubino: Sure. Well, it's important to understand that when governments panic, throughout history they've behaved in basically the same way. They go after the assets of their citizens in order to survive as an entity. A really good example is the Roman Empire. After the death of Julius Caesar there was a power struggle in Rome. And one group needed more money to finance an army, so they basically drew up a list of rich Romans, and accused them of crimes, executed them, and took their assets. They used that money to build an army which eventually won and they founded the Roman Empire. They turned what was a republic into a dictatorship. And in France, post revolution, 1789. The new government needed money again, and so they confiscated the lands of the Catholic Church and used that, used those resources to back a new currency, which they proceeded to print into oblivion. It caused a hyperinflation and brought about the rise of Napoleon. And in 1933, the U.S. Was deep into the Great Depression, FDR needed revenue, and he banned the ownership of gold for American citizens and ordered them all to turn in their gold to the government. And after he did that, he devalued the dollar versus gold, which is basically a confiscation of the real wealth of the people who had gold originally. Another interesting one was 1942, when soon after we had been attacked by Japan, the U.S. rounded up all the people of Japanese descent in the U.S. And put them in concentration camps and sold off a lot of their property. And then after the war when they released the people who had been interned, they didn't reimburse them fully for the assets that they took. So the government basically used their assets for the war efforts and never fully reimbursed them.
FutureMoneyTrends.com: That is shocking, and I'm surprised that's not more of a bigger deal in our history. We talked about the Japanese concentration camps, but I had no idea that they were taking their businesses and their property. John I wanted to ask you, in wealth confiscation, I know you obviously cited some of the articles, or things in history that stood out to you. Did you consider the IRS? Because prior to the income tax in 1913, Americans didn't pay an income tax. That is a form of wealth confiscation, would you agree?
John Rubino: Yeah, absolutely. That, though, because it's a law passed by congress and held up to the voters in each successive election, is at least something that happened through the political process and wasn't just sprung on people. And the income tax does have a rationale. I would rather have a tax system that focuses on consumption or something like that, but I think that there is an argument that it was an unconstitutional act at the time, but since that time it's been deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court, and it's really a fact of life. But yeah, had there not been an income tax, the government wouldn't have been able to grow to the point that it is today, and a lot of our problems of currency debasement and excessive regulation and the global military empire where we're invading everybody around the world, that wouldn't have been possible, because they wouldn't have had such a nice, clean, huge source of revenue.
FutureMoneyTrends.com: Now it seems that the most convenient way of confiscation would be inflation, or like what you had cited in ancient Rome where they just changed laws and made people criminals. Just to give you an example of all these laws that are out there, I mean everybody knows there are thousands that we're not aware of, but I was involved in an automobile accident out of state. About a month later I received something from my state that they've suspended my license and that they want me to pay them 200 dollars because I didn't notify them that I was involved in an accident out of state. And I had no idea that I had to report to my own DMV when I'm involved in an accident when the insurance companies and everything's kind of been taken care of. I can see laws like this where they're just like booby traps. Especially with the tax code. You can end up missing something on your taxes, and these guys, I don't know if you've ever received something from the IRS
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