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Title: Pope Francis: Tax Collector for the U.S. Government (Mission Accomplished: Theocracy)
Source:
Voices of Liberty
URL Source: http://www.voicesofliberty.com/arti ... lector-for-the-u-s-government/
Published: Jun 13, 2015
Author: Jason Peirce
Post Date: 2015-06-13 20:46:43 by Hondo68
Keywords: None
Views: 1756
Comments: 5
June 12, 2015—The Guardian reports that along with the ongoing “clean-up” efforts to correct its own history of corruption (including charges of money laundering), the Vatican bank has also agreed to comply with the U.S.’s Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). What’s FATCA? A 2010 law designed “to target non-compliance with US tax obligations. Under US law, American citizens who live abroad or have foreign bank accounts are required to report those accounts to the Internal Revenue Service.” So, the Pope and Vatican bank are now in-effect tax collectors for the U.S. government. Why? “In a signing ceremony at the Vatican, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, secretary for relations at the Holy See, emphasised the importance of paying taxes as a matter of charity and justice. ‘As Pope Francis frequently reminds us, evading just taxes is stealing both from the state and from the poor,’ he said. Signing the agreement was a step in the Vatican’s long-term strategy to ‘ensure and promote legality, transparency and ethical behaviour in the economic and financial fields’ he added.” Let’s wrap our heads around this. The Pope wants to help the U.S. government – one of the most powerful, violent, and corrupt governments in the history of the world — collect taxes in the name of “charity and justice” and “legality, transparency, and ethical behavior”? Is there anyone in their right mind who believes the U.S. government adequately exhibits any of the aforementioned attributes? And what of the notion that evading taxes “is stealing from the state and from the poor”? Do you believe your hard-earned money belongs to the state? The state produces nothing. It plunders the productive citizen. Are you happy with the wars, waste, and well, sins, your tax dollars are spent on? The Pope apparently is. He’s all for the state forcibly taking your money and threatening you with fines and imprisonment if you don’t pay. And nothing “steals” from the poor and redistributes power and wealth back to the so-called 1% the Pope decries like the U.S. government and its engine of corruption: the inflationist, moral-hazard fostering Federal Reserve. Needless to say, the 1% is the U.S. government political-crony class itself. Is this what the Pope stands for? This drives to the disturbing, fundamental flaws in the Pope’s understanding of government and economics — flaws he’s displayed time and again. Remember the Pope’s call to end “the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy”? If the Pope were truly serious he’d call to End the Fed, or at the very least Audit the Fed. And he most certainly would not become a tax collector for the U.S. government — the current (though flailing) “dictator” of the world economy. Here’s another example: “Pope Francis made one of his strongest attacks on the global economic system on Sunday, saying it could no longer be based on a ‘god called money’ and urged the unemployed to fight for work.” So, the Pope attacks the “idolatry” of money, but then urges people “to fight for work” to make… money? And all this from a man who heads an organization with $800 million in equity, holds $20 million in gold at the Fed, and runs a bank overseeing some $7 billion in assets? Being Catholic, and well, the Pope, Francis should certainly possess a stronger understanding of ethics, money, and economics. He can learn more about all three, for free no less, here. Furthermore, Pope Francis also misidentifies free market capitalism as the cause of the world’s economic problems and he erroneously sees government – the state – as a mechanism to provide for the “common good”: “ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good”. But it’s exactly government regulation and central bank intervention — the state — which causes the world’s economic problems. Free market capitalism didn’t cause the 2008 Great Recession, the government and Fed did. The Eurozone economic mess is not due to free market capitalism. It’s due to it’s own statism. What provides for the “common good” is more economic liberty, not more state. Yet the Pope calls for more state while exhibiting a grotesque propensity to butcher scripture to fit his perverse political economic narrative. Does he simply not understand the nature of the state? He should. The anti-liberty nature of the state is explicated throughout the Bible. Like Jesus Christ, Pope Francis is often referred to as a “Rock Star.” The difference is that Jesus Christ, the biggest Rock Star the world has ever known, fought “The Man.” The last thing Jesus Christ would ever do is work for “The Man.” As for FATCA, Simon Black says it best: “FATCA may prove to be the greatest disaster in US history.” Why? Because it seriously undermines U.S. legitimacy and influence over world banking and finance. Here’s Black: “The US government is taking a giant, steaming dump on its last remaining competitive advantage… you can only bully the rest of the world so many times before foreigners start looking for alternatives. And that is happening… Over the long-term, the end result will be fewer banks using the US system, resulting in a substantial decline in their use of US dollars and their ownership of US government debt. Think about it like this– foreigners currently own a third of US government debt. If they no longer have as strong an incentive to own US dollars and start reducing their load, who’s going to pick up the slack? Who will the US government turn to when they need to borrow money? Simple. You.” Indeed, enter Taxman: How do you feel about Pope Francis’s position on economics? Comment below. Poster Comment: Does this belong in Religion, or Government? The Anti-Liberty Union of Church, State, and Bank
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#4. To: hondo68 (#0)
Poop on the pope.
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