When they think you owe them money, the government isn’t as much about freedom as you’d like to think.
Savvy Nomad Capitalists know that “the land of the free” has become little more than a propaganda tool to convince Americans to stay put, because it couldn’t be any better anywhere else. In large part, it’s worked, keeping even patriotic fiscal conservatives chanting those five magic words.
For five unidentified (read: yet-to-be-identified) taxpayers, there is no freedom and no Constitutional protection, when it comes to your money. Those five were recently ordered by a US District Judge in Manhattan to turn over information about foreign bank accounts they are believed to have. The judge rejected their claim that being forced to do so violated the Bank Secrecy Act and more importantly, the right against self-incrimination in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.
Nope.
The judge claimed the obscure “Required Records Act” as the reason for the demand. Would you really expect the US government to not have a provision to force you to hand over your money when it was politically expedient, even if it violated the Constitution?
Many US citizens have been so brainwashed that they will always boast of America having the greatest system in the world no matter what constitutional provisions are violated through a back door.
That does not mean that circumventing protections like those designed to allow Americans to protect themselves against a money-grubbing government should be acceptable. To go that route is to accept permanent defeat, because most people will always be too uninformed to recognize or even are that the government will find whatever way it can around your “constitutional rights” and then claim it’s not violating the Constitution because of such-and-such law.
You know better. While I don’t advocating violating the law, I do advocate investigating a second passport and having a legal foreign bank account to protect yourself from whatever Constitution-trampling law your local bureaucrats come up with next.
