Cypress's economy has collapsed to the point where they want the EU to bail them out. As a part of this bailout deal, the Cypriot President agreed to an EU bailout (without Parliamentary approval) which will confiscate ('scuze me, tax) all bank deposits over €100,000 at 30-40%! Furthermore, new laws are in place prohibiting any significant withdrawals, check cashing and transport of significant amounts of cash from the country. So you can't (legally) avoid having 40% of your property stolen by a government that has overnight turned into a Stallinist tyranny.
Also going on this week, the Dutch Finance minister accidentally let slip that he considers this a template for all future EU bailouts. So the great and powerful European Union, which was created in order to stabilize the various European economies has now become a tyrannical dictatorship which will "help" poorer nations by confiscating money from its citizens. Help that would never have been needed if these nations had not adopted the communist/socialist policies demanded by the EU. And these bailouts won't help anything because the policies causing the continent's economy to melt down are not going away - in fact, they are being expanded upon.
And, of course, the United States is following close behind. Obama is trying to tank our economy as fast as possible by doing the exact same things that have killed Europe. You can mark my words that when our economy dies like Cypress's, the US government will similarly resort to confiscating everybody's money in order to delay the inevitable collapse by a few minutes.
Ayn Rand described this exact scenario in Atlas Shrugged. In it, a corrupt socialist government destroys the US economy by using government power to reward political friends (who are almost entirely incompetent businessmen) and punishing political enemies (who are almost entirely the productive members of society.) As more and more producers give up and leave, the economy gets worse and worse, and the government responds by becoming more and more tyrannical until eventually the entire system collapses altogether.
Rand set her book in the 1940s/50s. She wasn't wrong. She was just 70 years too early. And now we're living the same story. Only this time, there's no place where the productive members of society can go to live and produce while the rest of the world collapses. (Or if there is such a place, nobody has invited me to go there. :-()
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