The United States is in serious financial trouble. In 2011, the Federal Government borrowed over 40 cents for every dollar it spent, and the Federal Reserve Bank bought 61% of all the debt that the United States Treasury issued. When the Federal Reserve buys the debt, it is called “quantitative easing”, which is a euphemism for creating money out thin air (not money printing--but the creation of electronic money). Eventually, that will lead to high inflation, which is already becoming painfully visible in the prices for food and gas.

Tax freedom day in the United States is allegedly in April, but the hidden taxes of inflation make it much later in the year–in a manner that is completely dishonest. Hazlitt wrote in Economics in one lesson (p. 20):

Here we shall have to say simply that all government expenditures must eventually be paid out of the proceeds of taxation; that to put off the evil day merely increases the problem, and that inflation itself is merely a form, and a particularly vicious form, of taxation.

Veteran investor Marc Faber suggests that wealthy people will likely face a minimum of 50% reduction of wealth due to inflation, war and civil unrest, and asset price collapse. How can people protect themselves? Physical gold, say some. But alas, gold investors fear desperate measures by confiscatory governments to seize gold and to try to stop the gaps of their own uncontrolled spending.

In this light, John Rubino of dollarcollapse.com predicts that people will have to practice civil disobedience in order to protect themselves against an out-of-control government that is tending towards dictatorship. For example, he suggests putting gold in a foreign bank where the IRS can’t get to it. I have also suggested in certain cases that civil disobedience is a proper reaction to the IRS. For example, it is high time that those of us who are living abroad as citizens of other countries begin to practice disobedience to the unreasonable and unconstitutional demands that the IRS has been making against us. We have the great advantage, over US-based people, of having already made our great escape from the tyrannical grasp of this country, once-great but now turned desperate and evil.

We must do this because we cannot possibly meet the demands of two taskmasters (or tax masters). We must learn to disobey cheerfully, so that our grief does not kill us.

Hat tip: Monty Pelerin