The patrons of Bonnefooi, a cafe in the center of Brussels, last week received an inspector of the City to visit. Who asked them to pay the “tax dance.” Yes you read correctly. Brussels has a “dancing tax” written in the 50´s and as the government needs money, they have “revitalized” this tax since 2014. For every customer who dances in a bar the owner has to pay €0.40 per night.  They sent incognito civil servants to uphold this law.

There is an endless supply of old laws still on the books that have not been enforced, yet could be to raise money. In Florida, you are not allowed to have construction workers around on weekends. In some states, old laws required you to pull your car off the road if it frightened a horse. If the horse was still terrified, you were required to dissemble your car until the horse was calm.

They tried outlawing condoms back in the 1950s. That went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965 under Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), where the Supreme Court ruled that a state’s ban on the use of contraceptives violated the right to marital privacy. The case concerned a Connecticut law that criminalized the encouragement or use of birth control. Since the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare as a tax, anything goes. They can put a special tax on condoms and get away with that one and rake in billions.

Welcome to the world of collapsing socialism. This is where government get to rip us all off to survive.

The European Payments Council (EPC), a subdivision of the European Central Bank, is taking one giant step forward in their quest to eliminate all cash to increase taxes. They have gone ahead and set up the technical bases last week to enable the immediate payments system throughout Europe. One of the stumbling blocks has been the fact you cannot transfer money same day for banks like to play with your money and holding it for a few days. If the payment comes from overseas, the bank will not “clear” the funds usually for six weeks.

Unless money can become instant, it is really impossible to eliminate cash. The SEPA Credit Transfer Scheme will move to allow instant transfers. The goal is to eliminate ATM machines and force people to pay using their mobile phone beginning in November 2017. Of course, there is nobody thinking about tourism. How will an American pay for something on a vacation in Europe? One suggestion behind the curtain I was recently briefed on was they could pay in advance and have an app that then pays for things in Europe.

The hunt for taxes is getting pretty bad. The entire reason for the introduction of passports was by the Roman Emperor Diocletian following the collapse during the 3rd Century. Diocletian introduced wage and price controls, and doubled the number of bureaucrats at the government’s command; Lactantius was to claim that there were now more men using tax money than there were paying it. A form of introducing a passport not to travel to foreign lands since civilization was the Roman Empire, but to be able to travel within the Empire because you could not leave your home town until you paid your taxes.

King Henry V of England (1387–1422) is credited with having invented what considered the first true international passport. The king saw this as helping his subjects prove who they were in foreign lands and not the subject of the king where they traveled. The reason for this 1414 Act of Parliament was legal. You were the property of your King. If you committed a crime in France, the French king could not punish you. He had to send you back to your king in chains noting the crime you committed and asked that you be punished by your king. This legal foundation of “jurisdiction” was not overthrown until the American Revolution, which gave birth to territorial jurisdiction. Since it was a revolt against monarchy, it was seen as implausible that if an Englishman committed a crime in America, that they would still recognize the authority of the king and send him in chains to Britain to be punished. This new idea of territorial jurisdiction is directly outlined in the 6th Amendment:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.