Everyone heard how she threatened Microsoft in the event that its new operating system, Windows Vista, wasn’t to her liking. Well now she is annoyed about people offering credit card payment systems.

 

It seems the only thing Neelie and her pals on the comission like about credit cards is using them. The same thing happens to me: I like going shopping, but I hate it when store keepers want me to pay. Most of us stand it and pay because we accept private property and the market. In my case, the owner of the tomatoes and lettuces always asks me for something in exchange and the trade is usually in my interest. If it isn’t, then I go to another store or I plant my own tomatoes on my balcony. 

 

However, Neelie and her pals see things differently. They like the services credit card companies offer, but they don’t feel Visa and Mastercard should be so successful and they don’t like the price the companies arrive at in the market for their services. And since the power granted these commissioners is entirely excessive, they think they have the right to fine, penalize and demand lower prices as if this were like pruning bushed in her garden.

 

To top it all off, they say they are attacking Visa and Mastercard because the rates we pay for using their cards are a tax on consumption that raises prices by an average of 2.5 percent in the European Union. To compare a freely agreed upon price for credit card service to the forced expropriation carried out by governments is obscene. Worse, the person telling us this is the head of a privileged group that takes exorbitant salaries from European citizens through every imaginable kind of confiscatory tax.  

 

If they are so worried about taxes affecting consumption, they should work for free to abolish all tributes, because the truth is we always pay at the expense of consumption; some consume less today and others consume less tomorrow. The incompetence and arrogance of the people governing the Old World could not be more obvious.