> 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...
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.
Except the robbery isn't illegal because it is legally civil forfeiture which has repeatedly been upheld.
If you want another example of things that technically should be and people think are illegal for the government to do but are not because the government decided the constitution is inconvenient, look at the 100 mile border zone around the US, of which 2/3rds of people live in, that allows the government to ignore the 4th amendment and other rights. If the feds decide they want to search you without cause, they can just claim they think you are involved with or are an illegal and search you and your property without cause or proof of anything and also setup checkpoints and stop and search everyone in it. And even outside of the external borders, airports have also on occasion been considered a border point to justify such searches and checkpoint stops.
Just because some law isn't regularly enforced over some situation doesn't mean there isn't a law somewhere on the books to do so.
> Except the robbery isn't illegal...
It depends on the particulars. Not every roadside seize stands up to actual inspection. I'd bet that MOST of them (by number of seizures performed) wouldn't. See [0] for a few examples that caught the attention of the news.
> ...the 100 mile border zone...
I live in San Francisco. I'm quite aware. However, that -too- is policy that's continually being eroded by repeated court scrutiny. It's also -in fact- limited to warrantless inspection of immigration documentation... for anything else, you need either "probable cause" or a warrant (which is true for all searches everywhere in the US). [1]
[0] https://www.npr.org/2008/06/16/91555835/cash-seizures-by-pol...
[1] https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone#are-there-...
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.