Worse Than Robbery

This news from AFP in the Jakarta Post got my attention. Short enough for a full quote:

Sisters in Japan hide millions in boxes: official

(AFP) — Japanese authorities on Tuesday arrested two sisters for allegedly hiding some 58 million dollars in cardboard boxes to evade tax on their inheritance, an official said. It was the largest sum of inheritance money ever concealed from authorities in Japan, said the official from the National Tax Agency, which arrested the women in cooperation with police in the western city of Osaka.

Hatsue Shimizu, 64, and Yoshiko Ishii, 55, inherited money after their father, who was in the real estate and financial business, died three years ago."They concealed most of the money in cash" in a shed attached to Shimizu's house, the Osaka tax official said. "We have confiscated 50 cardboard boxes" packed with cash, he said.
The sisters, who hold South Korean nationality, allegedly failed to declare 5.9 billion yen (58 million dollars) out of a total of 7.5 billion yen they inherited from their father.

Once a friend of mine, a Jap’s working for the MOF, told me about the horrible inheritance tax in his country. No inkling to it anywhere in the news, of course; the reporter's lense might have been geared toward justifying the process of culpritization of the innocent. Or perhaps s/he'd been simply unaware of it.

My sympathies go to the sisters.

Some things our eyes can’t see, but sometimes we are compelled to see them clearly. This is the direction most governments are going to: paternalism, governmentalism or statism (or whatever name attached to it) that rips off citizens of their own property further and further.

Brutally honest writers have likened taxation as robbery--a legalized one. Close enough, but nay: it’s even far worse! Unlike robbery, taxing can turn an evil into an angel, a good man criminal.