{"id":16660,"date":"2013-03-18T21:35:17","date_gmt":"2013-03-19T02:35:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/?p=16660"},"modified":"2013-03-18T21:35:17","modified_gmt":"2013-03-19T02:35:17","slug":"it-begins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/?p=16660","title":{"rendered":"It Begins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chances are pretty low that you haven’t heard that the EU has decided to seize portions of people’s bank accounts in Cyprus<\/a> as a condition of a bank bailout:<\/p>\n

When Cyprus’s banks reopen on Tuesday morning, every depositor will have some of his or her money seized. Accounts under 100,000 euros will have 6.75% of the funds seized. Accounts over 100,000 euros will have 9.9% seized. And then the Eurozone’s emergency lending facility and the International Monetary Fund will inject 10 billion euros into the banks to allow them to keep operating.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s hard to express in words just how bad an idea this is. Europe has truly crossed the Rubicon<\/a>. <\/p>\n

“The establishment of the principle that a government can, and at times of economic strain must, help itself to your savings, and that this is a legitimate tool of statecraft, ought to provoke riots<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

I’ll go further: riots are not enough. <\/p>\n

If I were one of the people having my wealth confiscated, the proper response to such actions would be join an angry mob hanging the still-twitching bodies of the people who proposed and passed such a measure over the nearest lightpost. <\/p>\n

Think it can’t happen here? Remember, liberals have already floated the idea of seizing your 401K<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The Eurocrats in Brussels have already decided that they would prefer to seize people savings rather than let the Euro fail, or admit that the European cradle-to-grave welfare state is unsustainable. “The dream of political union matters more to Europe\u2019s governing caste<\/a> than the well-being of the people they represent.”<\/p>\n

I didn’t post anything yesterday because I was trying to figure out how much money I should put into gold and silver to get ahead of the European bank runs I half anticipated. Indeed, in this case such bank runs would etirely rational<\/a> But they haven’t started outside Cyprus itself<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Yet.<\/p>\n

More Cyprus news here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chances are pretty low that you haven’t heard that the EU has decided to seize portions of people’s bank accounts in Cyprus as a condition of a bank bailout: When Cyprus’s banks reopen on Tuesday morning, every depositor will have some of his or her money seized. Accounts under 100,000 euros will have 6.75% of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":6,"footnotes":""},"categories":[422,17,16,232],"tags":[2879,1883,2864,226,225,1193],"class_list":["post-16660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-democrats","category-economics","category-welfare-state","tag-budget","tag-cyprus","tag-democrats","tag-eu","tag-euro","tag-european-debt-crisis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16660"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16689,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16660\/revisions\/16689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}