Man has always survived through his labor - he simply must produces, trade and/or sell; it's how he feeds, houses and clothes himself and family or, put another way, it's absolute survival in the rawest sense. It's been that way throughout history and that paradigm will never change. But along comes government that literally extorts the product of his labor at the point of a gun, and the bigger the government theft machine the greater the efforts of man to skirt the robbery and extortion of taxation and government regulations. In the modern world, the activity of toiling to survive outside the expropriating system is called the underground economy or the shadow economy, and governments and bureaucratic goons are literally launching wars against folks for the crime of merely trying to survive because, well, human survival is verboten in the New World Order of corporatism, massive regulation, statism, socialism and command and control economies. It's been estimated that the underground economy in Greece is 30-50% of GDP. The Greeks have a long history of avoiding taxes, a practice that dates back to the days when Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire and subject to heavy taxation. The Greeks understand that all government is corrupt and thieving, hence the high level of motivation to conduct commerce in a manner that lessens government expropriation. Statists have been whining for years that the real problem with Greece is that the Greeks don't pay taxes.
However, Greece is far from the only European nation with a high level of underground economic activity. Bulgaria and Romania (both joined the EU in 2007) hold the #1 and #2 spot for underground economic activity, leaving Greece 3rd.
A Bloomberg article, here, offers insights on how and why folks flee to underground economies.
After quitting his job as a driver to focus on peddling imported shampoo and coffee at a Bucharest market, Costin Dumbrava is on the lookout for Romanian anti-fraud agents intent on ruining his flourishing business.
The 45-year-old runs a stall selling goods shipped over from Hungary and Austria to throngs of customers lured by prices that undercut local supermarkets by a quarter. The secret of his success? He doesn’t pay income tax and he doesn’t charge his clients value-added sales tax. “I couldn’t afford to sell at these prices if I paid taxes,” said Dumbrava, whose wares included brands from Procter & Gamble Co and Unilever NV. “I saw the crackdown and the raids on television. If my turn comes, I’ll have to give up.”
As nations such as Greece struggle to clamp down on tax evasion, Romania is making inroads to curb its more than $40 billion shadow economy, the European Union’s second-largest. With as much as a third of gross domestic product still off the books a quarter-century after communism, the push is designed to swell coffers and help the government reverse painful austerity.
The highlighted sentence above borders on sheer lunacy but is typical of what one would expect from a statist loving Bloomberg article. The fact that the article clearly states that the goal of cracking down on underground economic activity is to 'swell [public] coffers' is instructive on many levels. However, the assertion that giving governments more money reverses painful austerity is ludicrous to the point of being hilarious. When folks keep the product of their labor, there is far less economic hardship and poverty.
Most taxes fund huge government bureaucracies or in the case of America, taxes and an $18 trillion mountain of federal debt funds wars, the empire, government bureaucracies and socialism. Since joining the EU in 2007, Romanian debt has skyrocketed from 12.6% of GDP in 2008 to 39.6% in 2014, and undoubtedly that debt increase paid for the gargantuan government bureaucracy dictated by the EU bureaucrats and technocrats.
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Poster Comment:
Interesting information.