The Illusion of Democratic Choice and Individual Freedom

Is a democracy with totalitarian features better than an authoritarian society that leaves you alone?

Who this article is not for. Anyone who can’t handle criticism of the EU as an organisation with real totalitarian practices, and who has the same reply ready for every such criticism: “If you don’t like the high taxes in the EU, blanket financial surveillance, a million regulations and being forced to sacrifice your life for your country, then go to Russia!” If that is your view, stop reading now.

Slovaks on Ometepe, French people in Estelí

Ometepe is an island with two volcanoes in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. There I met Slovaks who live in Nicaragua and run businesses both there and in El Salvador. In Estelí, the cigar town in the north of Nicaragua, I talked to a few French people, quite ordinary people who no longer live in France. They left because of taxes and bureaucracy. Their families back in France work nonstop, but with huge expenses and taxes they can’t save anything and stay poor.

A friend of mine has been running a hotel in Nicaragua for twelve years. In all that time he has had no trouble with the state whatsoever. The state is simply not interested in him.

None of them can vote there. Nicaragua and El Salvador are authoritarian societies. And yet they live and do business there, not in their own democracies where they do have the vote. Paradoxically, they feel freer there than in the EU. That fascinates me.

A question to think about: what does your democratic right to vote actually give you?

The weight of one vote

Every time you cast a ballot for your favourite politician, so that they can impose on everyone, in your name, whatever matches your political beliefs, think about how much real freedom you get from a vote that weighs one against several million.

In Slovakia’s last parliamentary election, in September 2023, there were 4,388,872 registered voters and 68.51% of them turned out, roughly three million people. Your vote weighed one three-millionth. Six years ago, in my article Thieves of Time (in Slovak), I called it a millionth of a vote over which you have practically no control. Nothing has changed since.

How much freedom do you have when you can democratically choose which oppressor will impose a tax burden of almost two thirds and a million pointless regulations on you? And how much do you have when you don’t get that choice, and instead of rulers elected every four years you have one ruler who, like every other ruler, pushes whatever is supposedly for “the good of the citizens”?

I explained why I don’t vote back in 2016, in 7 Reasons Why I Don’t Vote and Won’t, later in You Can’t Vote Your Way to Freedom, and with Milan Seman in the podcast Why I Am Not a Democrat (all three in Slovak). My main argument is moral. By voting, you hand a politician coercive power over people who never agreed to it. This time, though, I’m interested in something more down to earth. What have elections actually brought you?

A simple experiment

Look at the list of Slovak prime ministers: Mečiar, Moravčík, Mečiar again, Dzurinda, Fico, Radičová, Fico, Pellegrini, Matovič, Heger, Ódor and Fico once more. Think hard about when your vote actually moved Slovakia forward. Not what it “could” do in some hypothetical future. When did it actually help?

Most people think of Dzurinda’s reforms and the 19% flat tax introduced in 2004. But look at what is left of them. From 2011, Iveta Radičová’s government “temporarily” raised VAT from 19 to 20%, until the deficit fell below 3% of GDP. The deficit did fall below 3%. The 20% stayed. The flat tax was scrapped in 2013. Today you pay 23% VAT, income tax has four brackets going up to 35%, and employee and employer together pay more than half of the gross salary in social and health contributions.

Democracy lends you a reform for a few years. It keeps the taxes for good.

And consider where Slovakia stands today. According to Eurostat it is one of the four poorest countries in the EU (GDP per capita in purchasing power is 75% of the EU average). In 2025 it ran the sixth-highest deficit in the EU, 4.4% of GDP. All three major rating agencies downgraded it within less than three years, most recently S&P in April 2026. And according to Slovakia’s Council for Budget Responsibility, the draft budget for 2027 very likely breaches the constitutional debt brake. It isn’t a collapse yet. After thirty-three years of independence, though, it is a sad record.

An authoritarian society that leaves you alone

Being able to vote democratically doesn’t add as much freedom as most people think.

Political scientists at the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg classify both Nicaragua and El Salvador as electoral autocracies: there are elections, but they aren’t free. They are not totalitarian states, they are authoritarian societies. The difference matters. A totalitarian state wants to control everything, including what you think, what you read and whom you meet. An authoritarian state wants power. As long as you stay out of its way, it couldn’t care less about you. That is exactly what my friend with the hotel experiences.

The irony is that the democratic EU is, in one respect, closer to totalitarianism than these authoritarian societies. It wants to know everything about you.

• A Slovak bank must hand your account data to the Slovak Information Service, the police and the tax office without your consent and without a court order. A written request is enough (Section 91(4) of the Slovak Banking Act).
• Every EU country must keep a central register of bank accounts, and by 10 July 2029 the Commission will connect them into a single system (Article 16 of Directive 2024/1640).
• In Slovakia you can pay at most €5,000 in cash (€15,000 between two private individuals). From 10 July 2027 an EU-wide cap of €10,000 applies to payments for goods and services where at least one party is a business (Article 80 of Regulation 2024/1624).
• From the same day, for any cash payment of €3,000 or more, a bank, currency exchange, crypto service, estate agent or precious-metals dealer will have to verify your identity from your ID card or passport (Article 19(4) of Regulation 2024/1624).
• The EU has extended the voluntary scanning of private messages, known as Chat Control, until April 2028, and talks on a mandatory version are still going on.
• A digital euro with holding limits is planned for 2029.

If this isn’t a totalitarian practice, what is? In Nicaragua, by contrast, banks report cash transactions only from $10,000 a day.

Taxes, social contributions and territorial taxation

My friends in Nicaragua and El Salvador confirm that doing business there is much easier than in Slovakia. I checked whether the numbers agree.

Taxes and social contributions in Slovakia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Panama, verified in October 2026. Sources: PwC, EY, KPMG, OECD, podnikajte.sk, FUNTRAB, Denationalize.me.

Local taxes in El Salvador and Nicaragua are not low. A company pays 30% on its profit, and in Nicaragua also a minimum tax of 1 to 3% of turnover, even when it makes a loss. VAT is 13% in El Salvador and 15% in Nicaragua.

The difference lies elsewhere. Both El Salvador and Nicaragua have territorial taxation. They tax only income from domestic sources, and what you earn abroad is not taxed (in El Salvador explicitly since March 2024). Social contributions are much lower there, and voluntary for the self-employed. In Slovakia, as a self-employed person, the contributions alone cost you 33.15% plus 16% of the assessment base, and at least about €425 a month even if you earned nothing. On top of that, Slovakia, like every EU country, claims tax on all your worldwide income, including what you earned outside the EU (the only exceptions are special regimes for wealthy foreigners, for example in Malta or Italy). I added Paraguay and Panama to the table because they have territorial taxation too, and they are democracies.

So in what matters most, economic freedom in El Salvador and Nicaragua is much higher than in the EU: how much the state takes from you and how much it wants to know about you. The classic rankings don’t show it that way. In the Index of Economic Freedom 2026 (Heritage Foundation), Slovakia scores 67.7, El Salvador 57.7 and Nicaragua 53.6, because the index also measures property rights and judicial independence, and authoritarian states rightly fail there. Freedom House measures political rights and civil liberties, not the level of taxes, so Slovakia does well in it.

In April 2026 the people behind Denationalize.me published their own ranking of 235 countries and territories by how much they leave a person alone. They define freedom as the absence of coercion and rate states by how much coercion and surveillance they need to fund themselves. They look at taxes and exit taxes, inflation, licences and regulations, land ownership, guns, homeschooling and compulsory military service. El Salvador came second, right behind the private city of Próspera in Honduras, Nicaragua 28th and Slovakia only 133rd. Germany is 158th and France 202nd.

Tax slavery

Western-style democracy introduces real slavery, and that is tax slavery. According to the M. R. Štefánik Conservative Institute, mandatory payments in Slovakia reached 63.59% of labour costs at the average wage. At higher incomes it is even more. In the top, 35% bracket, the state takes 59 cents directly out of every additional euro your employer pays for you, and once you spend the rest with 23% VAT, as much as two thirds.

If you work for the state almost two thirds of your life, the state is stealing most of your most productive years. That is one of the main reasons I don’t live in Slovakia.

Bureaucracy and taxes are outright theft of the productive lives of all Europeans. And on a relatively short human life, this theft has a far bigger impact than whether you can democratically elect your oppressor once every four years.

Democracy doesn’t guarantee safety

Most Hondurans would gladly trade their “democracy” for Bukele’s authoritarian government. According to Latinobarómetro 2026, 69% of Hondurans wouldn’t mind an undemocratic government if it solved their problems. In Mexico more than half of people answered the same way. In the 2024 survey Hondurans gave Bukele a score of 9.1 out of 10, the highest of any country. Today Bukele is the best-rated leader in 14 of 17 Latin American countries.

No wonder. In 2015 El Salvador had more than 100 murders per 100,000 inhabitants and was the most murderous country in the world. In 2025, according to the government, the rate was 1.3. Take that number with caution, because the data is classified and the government doesn’t count people killed by police, deaths in prisons or bodies from clandestine graves (InSight Crime). But the felt difference is huge. In El Salvador 87% of people feel safe walking alone at night, against 73% in France and 69% in Slovakia (Gallup).

I have my own experience too. I have visited every country in Latin America except Venezuela (admittedly, I was careful), and the first time I was robbed was in London. That is not a one-off. Plenty of people in our Paraguay community, our own clients, never had a problem in Paraguay and got robbed in Spain or France instead.

Was the Salvadoran miracle possible only because Bukele gained absolute power? Partly, yes. Democratic governments tried a hard crackdown on the gangs too, but in 2004 the constitutional court struck down their anti-gang law. Mass arrests became possible only after Bukele’s party won a two-thirds majority in 2021 and parliament, at its very first session, removed the constitutional court judges and the attorney general. But he didn’t seize power. Voters gave it to him. In 2024 they re-elected him with almost 85% of the vote, even though the constitution banned immediate re-election and only the new constitutional court allowed it. A year later he had unlimited terms approved.

Democracy built its own autocrat.

The price is high. Since March 2022 more than 90,000 people have been arrested, about 1.5% of the population, and El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Human rights groups have documented at least 575 deaths in custody. The government itself has released about 8,000 people it arrested wrongly, and the organisation Socorro Jurídico Humanitario estimates the number of innocent detainees at 30,000. In 2025 at least 40 journalists fled the country.

All my life I have criticised locking up people who didn’t directly harm anyone. Bukele’s prisons are full of murderers, but also of people whose only “crime” was paying the gangs protection money or keeping watch for them. In October 2026 Bukele more or less admitted it himself, when he announced a plan for the early release of some of these gang “collaborators”: “if we were to arrest everyone who collaborated with gangs, we would have to arrest 20% of the population.” According to the chart he showed, about half of 10,629 occasional collaborators, roughly 5,300 people, could get out through a work programme. No court decides who goes free, and those released will serve the rest of their sentences under supervision. It comes four months before an election in which Bukele is running for another term.

I wouldn’t buy Bukele’s kind of safety. But El Salvador does show one thing. Elections don’t guarantee safety, and most people in Central America know that better than we do.

Every state needs victims

An authoritarian regime needs victims to hold itself together: it eliminates the opposition, critics and often innocent people too. A democratic state needs victims to hold its territory together as well: conscription, which it imposes on its citizens whether they want it or not. In both cases it is violence against its own citizens.

So the democratic system is not more moral in principle. Almost every democratic country has compulsory mobilisation in its laws, meant to keep the state intact. That is why I called it modern slavery in my article Slavery in the 21st Century (in Slovak).

Authoritarian Nicaragua is, at least on paper, freer than Slovakia in this respect. Its constitution itself says there is no compulsory military service, and it bans any forced recruitment into the army, the police or the interior ministry. Compulsory military service was abolished there back in 1990. The Slovak constitution, by contrast, says that defence is “a duty and a matter of honour of citizens”.

I would never, in any era, have wanted to sacrifice my life for a Celtic tribe living on the territory of today’s Slovakia, for the Roman Empire, Austria-Hungary or Czechoslovakia. In the same way, I don’t want to sacrifice it for Slovakia. I see no difference in principle.

Democratic governments that force their citizens to sacrifice their lives for the state against their will are no better than authoritarian systems that eliminate their opponents.

Even dictators’ officials believe they are doing good

People who work for authoritarian regimes believe, just like people who work for democratic governments, that they are doing the best for the people. They help the poor, build hospitals and support all kinds of social programmes. That holds in almost every authoritarian country I have visited. And they have a good reason to. They need to keep their citizens loyal and keep strikes and protests to a minimum.

So the democrat and the dictator both need to convince you of the same thing: that you pay them for your own good. As I wrote in War as the Cancer of the Authoritarian Political System (in Slovak), practically every state in the world has the traits of an authoritarian system. They differ only in how much they take from you and how many areas of your life you let them into.

Freedoms you don’t have in the EU

An uncensored internet. El Salvador doesn’t systematically block websites. Nicaragua doesn’t block social networks or foreign websites and doesn’t shut down the internet. According to OONI measurements, exiled opposition media such as Divergentes and Artículo 66 are normally reachable from Nicaragua in 2026. In March 2025 the regime did delete the .ni domains of opposition outlets such as La Prensa, Confidencial and 100% Noticias, but they have carried on at .com, .tv and .digital addresses.

In Slovakia, internet providers are ordered to block a list of almost a thousand websites kept by the Gambling Regulatory Authority, including Polymarket since June 2026. And in 2022 the National Security Authority blocked four “disinformation” websites without a court, under an emergency law. On top of that, since March 2022 the whole EU has used sanctions to ban spreading RT and Sputnik by any means, internet providers included, and it has extended the list of banned Russian media several times since.

Accounts that don’t report you to the tax office. An account in El Salvador or Nicaragua isn’t automatically reported to any tax authority, Slovak or otherwise. Neither country takes part in CRS (the exception is Americans, whose banks report under FATCA). Nicaragua isn’t even a member of the OECD Global Forum, and its bank secrecy also blocks requests from foreign tax authorities. That doesn’t cancel your tax obligations, though. If you are a tax resident of Slovakia or any other country that taxes worldwide income, you still have to declare the income from such an account.

Low inflation. El Salvador uses the US dollar, and inflation there was 0.91% at the end of 2025. The Nicaraguan córdoba has been firmly pegged to the dollar since January 2024, at 36.6243 córdobas per dollar, and inflation there was 2.7% for 2025. Slovakia had 4.1% inflation in December 2025, the highest in the euro area (the average was 1.9%) and more than four times El Salvador’s.

Bitcoin. In El Salvador bitcoin is legal, and you can freely use and hold it. Since January 2025, under the deal with the IMF, nobody has to accept it any more, but nobody persecutes you for it either. On top of that, bitcoin gains aren’t taxed there. For a million dollars in bitcoin or USDT you can get a Freedom Visa with a path to citizenship. In Slovakia bitcoin is practically unusable as a means of payment. Every sale, every swap for another cryptocurrency and every coffee you pay for is a taxable event, there is no holding-period exemption, and on the gain you pay up to 35% tax plus 16% health contributions, up to 51% in total.

Conclusion

I’m not defending authoritarian regimes in the slightest, and I wouldn’t want to live in any of them. Nor do I want to live in Slovakia, where the state would steal almost two thirds of my productive life.

But if I have to choose between a democracy with totalitarian features and an authoritarian society that leaves me alone, I gave my answer two years ago in our newsletter. Of all the authoritarian societies, which is where the EU with its totalitarian practices will soon belong, I prefer the ones with lower taxes.

The best option, of course, is a democracy that leaves you alone. Those exist. In the Denationalize.me ranking Paraguay is third with 8.525 points, right behind El Salvador, and Panama fifth with 8.225 points. Both are democracies, and Liberation Travel can help you get residency in either. If you’re not sure which country fits you, take our residency quiz. And have a look at our services for Paraguay and Panama.

You have a much stronger vote than the one at the ballot box. You can vote with your feet: decide where you live, where you pay taxes and where you keep your money. That vote weighs one to one, and no majority can outvote you. I wrote more about it in A Reproach to the Voter: The Power of Voice and the Power of Exit (in Slovak).

Dropping a ballot into a box once every four years guarantees you neither safety nor freedom. Least of all economic freedom, which democratically elected populists are happy to trade for the security of the masses.