Michigan’s lawmakers and governor seem determined to remind us that history is no nonstop march into the light.
In the Great Lake State, the latest confirmation is a return to virtually unrestricted legalized cash-grabbing at the airport, reversing halfhearted reforms of several years earlier.
After those reforms were enacted, a traveler had to be toting in excess of $50,000 before officials a Michigan airport could be “justified” in confiscating his cash on a mere suspicion that it is associated with a crime.
But now, because of legislation just signed by Governor Whitmer, the threshold has been knocked down to $20,000.
Maybe you must be naïve to carry so much cash where police and other functionaries can easily get at it, but as Dan King of the Institute for Justice observes, you don’t have to be a criminal. And traveling with cash is not a crime.
Around the country, innocent persons have often run afoul of civil forfeiture laws that let authorities steal money earned by others without any showing that the money is ill-gotten.
With help from organizations like Institute for Justice, people who make the mistake of traveling with substantial cash — to buy a truck, open a bank account, whatever — just might get their money back after spending months in the courts.
And suffering much anxiety.
For the officials who cause the anxiety, both the thefts and any temporary judicial setbacks amount to just another day at the office.
This is open thievery by the State, turning cops into robbers.
Opposing it is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “The War Against Cash Carriers”
The many history courses that I took in high school or in college spent little-or-no time on the question of how the state arose or on the evolution of the process by which it extracted resources. But the latter is absolutely essential to understanding the former.
While repeated attempts have been made to harness the state as an instrument of justice, and people such as I believe that the state is unavoidable and should be made an instrument of justice, the state arose in behalf of a gang with the purpose of opportunistically extracting the results of production, the state has generally evolved primarily in response to the evolution of opportunities for such extraction, and in each attempt to re-create the state as something else it provides a potential opportunity for a gang again to put the state to its original purpose.
Civil forfeiture is nothing less than theft under color of law.
No matter how they try to “justify” it, they are nothing more than common thieves
When a member of an armed criminal gang attempts to rob someone, that person is justified in blowing away every member of the armed criminal gang. Americans today are faced with the stark choice of either standing up for their rights or forfeiting them forever. Words have failed to stem the tide of government overreach, so more pointed methods are required.