i also percieve this, in fact, it's why i left australia. you think licenses and regulations are bad in the USA hah! *laughs in pompous bad australian accent psychotic government bureaucrat*
same in netherlands
same in england
same in madeira even, though not so bad, the madeira police are not revenue collectors, it's the imposed gendarmerie who are paid by lisbon to enforce EU taxes.
freest markets i saw in europe were in small towns in the balkans. everyone selling their eggs, home brewed yogurt from local cow, sometimes goat or sheep milk. peppers, onions, handicrafts.
in Sofia, anyone can just take a bunch of stuff, lay it out on the pavement, so long as they don't block too much foot traffic, almost anywhere. no busking licences (for some months i was feeding myself while homeless in Sofia by playing a flute i built from some money i saved from begging in the metro stations out of a discarded wine cork, polypropylene pipe, and a little engraver and a small ruler. and begging, so long as you aren't scamming people. actual formal business though, is more covert and clandestine, but it is practically the rule in small towns. the problem in balkans is usually that if you make a business, and it is successful, the oligarchs demand you sell it to them, or else.
nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzq404wwm9rmln28d40vrqr53sytvv2vhesfwmzzjhx04l8xly4gsmqydhwumn8ghj7mmjd3uj6un9d3shjtnfd4mkzmry9ejh2tcpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezumrpdejz7qpqjrj7u63l7ywqx54tnk2sd9zvzxw6n3pcg24d09tv558nvrr9rhgqaekd80
Replies (4)
That, I think, is the rule in business... Oligarchs want it, or else.
Not that I'd know personally, but I watch intensely. That sounded stalkerish... Oh well.
Sometimes I hear a one liner that sticks in my head forever - one such one liner was : "the CIA is the best business school in the world." Strikes true. Take over, one way or another.
Not trying to point the finger at them in particular. I think a country either has a formalized mafia or they have some other country's mafia, in which case they're not a sovereign country. The only real difference between countries is how far along they are in stealing everything in the country. In the west, nobody owns anything - we're the new commies. That's because the oligarchs have stolen everything. When there's nothing left to steal, they steal lives. In some places you get outright genocides ; in the west, our genocide is the falling population, which is because most people can't afford to live. Hard genocide, soft genocide - its genocide either way. Democracy should have protected us from organized crime - instead it became the crime. Survival - or surviving to the degree of affording a family - depends on getting to a place where the mafia hasn't stolen the whole country yet.
I’d love to see some small towns in Europe one day; best I’ve seen is the hillsides outside of Budapest in Hungary. I loved Thailand for this reason tho, the cities could fuck off. I loved the small island vibes.
In America the small town is either dead or supported by some corporate general store/grocery chain.
We may be cooked.
The "asshole elite" theme really is cross-ideological it seems...
To generalize, in all places and times governments notice success and exploit it. The threshold varies. In the US, the threshold used to be relatively high, now it is relatively low. In China, the threshold is relatively high. In Sofia, it is between the US and China.
