Comment by jjallen
Comment by jjallen 4 days ago
Possession of money should not be a crime. Not everyone with money is “shady”.
Comment by jjallen 4 days ago
Possession of money should not be a crime. Not everyone with money is “shady”.
>Possession of money should not be a crime.
Cash has been illegal for a long time, and it's not just civil forfeiture that makes it illegal. Your bank has been deputized to spy on you if you deposit sums above a limit, at the limit, and "below the limit" (that's structuring also a crime). Other "negotiable instruments" have been outlawed, so that if you want to carry around your wealth, you have to do it in (at most) $100 increments, and they have threatened all my life to stop printing those and bump it down to $20. Meanwhile, in the last two decades we've had two major incidents where if you deposited the money anyway, it could just disappear out from under you without any real guarantees. And when none of that is enough to deter you, they inflate it away day after day until 20 years later it is worth only half of what it used to be. The strong-armed the swiss into no longer offering numbered accounts 30 years ago now. These things aren't coincidences. Money is very much illegal.
> Cash has been illegal for a long time...
Weird. I pay for nearly everything with cash.
I agree that nearly all of the rest of the stuff your comment describes is totally real and totally bullshit, but please don't ruin a good retelling of the facts with breathless hyperbole.
People do illegal stuff all the time without even knowing it, that doesn't mean the cops and courts can't still fuck you over with it at any time. And even if you just had $20 in your pocket, a cop could seize it and claim they think it was used to buy or was going to sometime in the future buy drugs, and legally that is a completely valid reason even if you have zero drugs in your system and zero on you and were inside a McDonalds waiting in line to buy a burger.
> People do illegal stuff all the time without even knowing it...
If using and carrying cash was illegal, I wouldn't be able to go to -say- Wal*Mart and hand them cash in exchange for goods and services.
I agree that cops in many jurisdictions are permitted to engage in consequence-free-for-the-perpetrators highway robbery whenever they encounter someone carrying cash. The thing that's illegal in that scenario is the robbery.
The "they didn't hassle me or even notice this time" theory of non-illegality.
Uhm no
The vast vast majority of the money supply exists as electronic balances, the entire M2
If you have a liquidity concern about harassment then have balances and passive growth in all forms of liquidity. Cash, electronic cash, crypto. Then you never have to transfer balances between those systems and dont have to make it your whole identity.
Exactly. And the appropriate "safeguard" is conviction of a crime. At sentencing, it would be appropriate for a court to consider whether some amount of money constitutes the proceeds of a crime, and what the appropriate disposition of that money would be to best provided restitution to those harmed by the crime. And if there is some belief that something might happen to the assets before then, we have processes like preliminary injunctions, which have a high burden of proof. Until one of those things happens, there are no grounds to justify seizure of any assets.