Except this actually used to happen a lot in European countries in the Middle Ages. Farmers would still pay taxes to the king, and they'd have to pay in goods if not in gold.

Pretty sure the OP was talking about the present times...

Plus, he was saying that prior to banks being how they are now, things were different. That prior period encompasses the middle ages.

I don't know. Your question is sufficiently general that a plausible answer could be given to support either "yes" or "no" answers. It is very dependent on what you mean by "change". And therein lay my answer: I don't know what you mean by "change".

The poster in this case was touching on a point that going out and taking a farmer's property (or generally anyone for that matter) explicitly was very unlikely to happen, but taking it from a bank is considered something else entirely. I think that's fairly reasonable in the first world. Could a scenario arise in the future where that isn't reasonable? Sure. But, that's kind of beside the point here I think.

If you extend your reasoning to the extreme, you could pretty much say to anything, "Well, humans have done it before so what's stopping them from doing it again?" The answer is nothing, but it's a red herring: it ignores the possibility that the chance of some Event X has gone down with the passage of time. Perhaps it has gone down so much, that it is no longer reasonable to address it if one want to maintain a modicum of concision.

I don't think of the government taking people's savings out of a bank and the government taking people's land as very different. It's a small and easy step to take from one to the other, and it's a step that has been taken many, many times before.

As to your last paragraph; it is foolish to assume social changes or governmental behaviors are more or less likely because of technological advances.

We're not talking about the entire world.

> I don't think of the government taking people's savings out of a bank and the government taking people's land as very different.

Yes. I don't either, and neither does the top parent. That's the point.

> As to your last paragraph; it is foolish to assume social changes or governmental behaviors are more or less likely because of technological advances.

If you say so.

See the interesting thing for me is that the taking of physical property is actually just as likely as taking savings from banks. You and the op seemed to disagree with this, but I don't know what you could use to back that opinion up.

If you believe that the discovery of electricity makes me a better person, or even a different one, I don't know what to say to you.

The top parent is.

> They're not all that different from governments elsewhere.

This statement is content free. "Different" is sufficiently general in this context as to be completely useless.

> See the interesting thing for me is that the taking of physical property is actually just as likely as taking savings from banks. You and the op seemed to disagree with this, but I don't know what you could use to back that opinion up.

The top parent said

> They would have never gone to a farmer and taken 10% of their grain.

Which is true by observation. Governments in first world countries are demonstrably not doing this.

> If you believe that the discovery of electricity makes me a better person, or even a different one, I don't know what to say to you.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. This conversation has nothing to do with electricity or what defines a person to be "better".

Please allow me to be more specific. Western European and North American governments are not, in terms of quality of leadership or structure of administration, tangibly different from many governments not present in those regions. Further, seizure of land is not unknown in the US.

If the government isn't particularly different, is it some quality of the people present in those countries that makes you so confident that they wouldn't take physical property?

>Which is true by observation. Governments in first world countries are demonstrably not doing this.

That's an interesting point to make because prior to this instance, governments in the developed world didn't take 10% of deposits, either.

>I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. This conversation has nothing to do with electricity or what defines a person to be "better".

Well, your response to my prior statement about the assumption that social and governmental changes are brought about along with technological changes was "if you say so."

This is generally something people say when they don't agree, but can't or don't want to prove their point. It's a tactic used to undermine the argument of the opposition without presenting a defined counter. I was responding to that.

There are despots and tyrants all over the world. They are very tangibly different from Western European and North American governments in terms of quality of leadership or structure of administration.

> Further, seizure of land is not unknown in the US.

We're talking about grain, not land. The specifics of the example are particularly relevant.

> If the government isn't particularly different, is it some quality of the people present in those countries that makes you so confident that they wouldn't take physical property?

I'm not confident at all that they wouldn't take physical property. Once again, this is irrelevant. We aren't talking about probability, or chance, or anything of the sort.

Once again, the top parent is a commentary on cognitive dissonance using factual observations about the world. Governments are not taking grain from farmers, but governments are taking money from banks.

> That's an interesting point to make because prior to this instance, governments in the developed world didn't take 10% of deposits, either.

Well, yes... The top parent was contrasting this with something the top parent believed was morally equivalent, but was not practiced.

> "if you say so." ... This is generally something people say when they don't agree, but can't or don't want to prove their point.

Actually, I meant it as, "I don't care to argue that point because it's irrelevant to the topic of conversation."

See, this is your part about cognitive dissonance. Except, there isn't any cognitive dissonance if governments are just as likely to take grain from farmers as they are to take money from bank accounts. There's no contradiction there.

>They would have never gone to a farmer and taken 10% of their grain. They would have never gone and taken physical property in peoples home. That would had been an complete impossibility.

And this is the part where we start talking about probability, because he's wrong.

>We're talking about grain, not land. The specifics of the example are particularly relevant.

They're actually not. We're talking about virtual property vs. physical property, not grain vs. cash.

It is my position that the lack of physical presence of property does not result in the greater likelihood that the property will be seized, save in instances where the physical property is impossible to seize for some reason. That's all. Governments are supposed to exist to protect the property of their citizenry. Unfortunately, many don't hold that up.

Instead, the 17th and 18th centuries are a good milestone in the the history of banking where its function is similar to the one we expect today. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_banking)

> but they could only do this because banks and government has stopped seeing money in the bank as belonging to the person who put it there. They would have never gone to a farmer and taken 10% of their grain. They would have never gone and taken physical property in peoples home.

Now instead of "stopped seeing money in the bank as belonging to the person who put it there," simply think of "stopped seeing labor/goods/(taxable things) as belonging to the person who performed/has it/them."

IMO, the top parent was a commentary on cognitive dissonance. It's implied that the parent believes taking stuff from the bank is morally equivalent to taking 10% of the grain from a farmer. The parent could have been more explicit, but alas, this was how I interpreted it.

He's saying because the banks are structured a certain way, the government behaves differently than they would otherwise. Namely that the government feels it has a right to the goods/property of the citizenry that they did not have before. I disagree, because governments did things like this without the banks.

It's about both. The top parent can't make this statement

> They would have never gone to a farmer and taken 10% of their grain.

without an assumption of moral equivalence.

True that gold has no intrisic value, it's value is derived from other people valuing it and willing to trade services for it - and they have done so for thousands of years, where as a typical fiat currency (USD) does not have such a timespan. "Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – zero." (Voltaire, 1694-1778)

btw - as i understand it wasn't a 10% tax, it was a mandatory debt for equity trade- meaning the depositors now own some part of the bank.

Money has no value, it is in fact nothing more than tradeable debt. It has as much value as the market is willing to allow. To imagine this in an extreme case imagine if the entire worldwid economy collapsed and food bacame very much rarer. Now you'd expect to have to pay vastly more gold for food. Inflation.

My point is that no part of the economy is static, all of it is dynamic. All of it. The value of everything, labor, goods, food, even money is dynamically dictated by the action of the economy.

The intrinsic value of EVERYTHING is 0. Things only have value because people want them, not because they have some intrinsic value.

Does anyone with a legal background have any insight they want to share? I am having trouble wrapping my brain around the idea that money I have in the bank could be seized to pay for someone else's fuckup. I know inflation can sort of do that on a society-wide scale, but seizure of post-tax income from a private bank account? That's mind-boggling.

The US government made a 50%+ profit by forcing people to sell their gold in 1933:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102#Effect_of_...

>Executive Order 6102 required all persons to deliver [gold] owned by them to the Federal Reserve, in exchange for $20.67 ... The price of gold from the Treasury for international transactions was thereafter raised to $35 ... resulting in an immediate loss for everyone who had been forced to surrender their gold ... The resulting profit that the government realized funded the Exchange Stabilization Fund

But, it would take truly dire straits for Congress to even consider such an obviously unpopular idea. And those dire straits would have a much harder time arriving in the U.S. than the EU.

Cypress (and Greece, and Italy, etc) is in such big trouble because they cannot print their own currency. The U.S. can always bail out its banks because it can create as many dollars as it needs. In fact this is what happened a few years ago, and why the U.S. financial system is currently in better shape than the EU.

The flaws in the EU concept have been laid bare by this financial crisis. When you have financial consolidation without political consolidation, you get unelected bureaucrats deciding to take 10% of the bank accounts in one member nation, and there's nothing that population can do about it. In the U.S., the threat of getting voted out office is a powerful restraint on the governent's eagerness to levy shocking new taxes.

Part of the reason I think they're crazy to do this is that the above is obviously not true.

There may be nothing the population can legally do about it, but we're living in a time when governments are in genuine danger of going bankrupt, funny money isn't worth the paper it's printed on, and people are literally worrying about essentials like putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their kids' heads. Sooner or later, if we continue down this path, something is going to give, spectacularly.

Unfortunately, when that happens, it will probably come with a horrific body count and potentially even civil or all-out international war. That's the really terrifying thing about this whole mess: it is disrupting the basic fabric of society, the implicit trust we all place in our political and legal and financial systems so we can enjoy our modern, civilised lifestyles. We take a lot of things about that civil society for granted that we would miss dearly if they were gone.

We can only hope that whoever thought this blatant cash grab was a good idea will come to their senses in time to contain the fallout if they go through with it.