There is a group of people who call themselves ‘autonomous’ and who, so to speak, leave society. They argue that the laws and regulations do not apply to them. Which in practice means that they stop paying rent, insurance and taxes, for example.
A woman from the north of the Netherlands tells Pointer how she was misled and now deeply regrets it. She had a debt of 30,000 euros, which got her into trouble. “Bailiffs at the door, collection agencies, we have already been cut off from gas, water and electricity.”
Then she heard at a meeting that you can also become ‘sovereign’. “You didn’t pay anything anymore. No taxes, rent, mortgage or gas, water and electricity.” That was music to her ears. “I wanted to believe it.”
But she came from the rain to the drip because of this so-called ‘autonomous life’. Jelle van Buuren, senior lecturer in Security Studies at Leiden University, explains: “Families with children end up on the street because they really think that the government has no right to tax them or that they do not have to pay rent. And if If you screw some kind of sign on the facade saying ‘I am an embassy’, then the idea is that the government is not even allowed to come in.”
“We are now starting to see examples of the government actually coming in, causing people to go bankrupt, become bankrupt, and be evicted from their homes. That is the social drama you see.”
It also happened to the woman at Pointer. “I now think I have between 50,000 and 55,000 euros in debt. It has become much worse.” Now she regrets “How stupid I was to get sucked into that. It is a black page in my life. I should never have done it.”
Sources): Subway