Stealing from the masse through taxes is nothing new or isolated to some fringe rogue countries

The trade with script (inexistant merchandises that we fake into existance on paper) without facts and actual goods is not a novelty in the world of power, it was practiced in the time of Communist dicatorships openly top down just like in Capitalism (the quinquennial production plannning fulfilled in four and a half years, comrades..., that is, they put on a quinquennial more prodcutive than needed, when they manufactured as much as was needed in relaity... they continued to manufacture on paper, meanwhile the raw material was processed, distributed to beneficiaries who ... manufactured nothing, but the raw material disappeared from the warehouses anyway... at my house, at your house, and so the communists from comuisits states capitalized to the full with the help their plant directors, staling nahd in hand with the storekeepers, and besides them everyone was profiting, from the porter to the lathe turner to the maid, and it works just the same in capitalism with the corporations)

The script trade was massivelly used also in Feudalism (that is, that archaic form of capitalism, from which were born communism (a state form of capitalism) and socialism (a pre-communist form of communism) and fascism (a private form of state owned by who has the money and has the politician in their pocket) or democracy (another form of feudalism but which prefers a cool spoiling with an ancient Greek touch, in which slavery was not abolished but was enormized to include everyone and everything) that apart from the name of the ancient philosophical origin is nothing else but communism or fascism or capitalism or socialism, but we add "democracy" somewhere to make it palatable, and let stupidity vote to make it look like they have rights, while we do everything as our muscles (money) want. .. the ones with the corporations in our pocket (personally, I don't have any)

The script trade was going well even under Romans, or Greeks or other imperial orders, every empire needs a budget to equip, recruit, build, but mainly to tax their subjects into poverty (is it any different today?) what did you think it was invented today, because where there is a pile of money (budget) it gathers flies just like manure does, some are elected to manage it, others are technocrats hired to manage it, others are relatives and friends of those above who sell to the budget at 5 times what it costs on the market and they also give back something... there... to whom it procures their signature on the contract.

That's why empires fall (the scriptural trade so that we can steal by overpticed vaccines, masks, stents, weapons, drugs, ammunition, diesel from Bulgaria for Ukrainians made from Russian sanctoned oil in refineries owned by the Russians in Bugaria and transited by trains and railways by Romanians... please, I can give thousands of pages of examples here), including the fall of the USSR and more recently NATO, a mega-empire in direct decline, the bad part is that it is not only the one on which they fall to suffer, they are doomed for a long time (now they aim to fall on Putin and XI, and a few others) but also the ones whom falls breaks their neck, and you and I are somewhere in that collapsing NATO nacelle, pure kamikaze style, with or without our will, but we are in, and when it crashes, the mush of our brains will squirt out of our nostrills like a jelly, we don't want to but what choices we have?.