Category: privacy

Inconvenient Cash?

currency, money, binary, electronic, cash, illustrattion

Everywhere I turn these days, I am hearing something about the push to get rid of cash.

Yes, cash. Greenbacks. Federal Reserve Notes.

You might think that getting rid of cash is a no-brainer. Cash makes up only 11 percent of the money supply. Most of the money stock is already those 1s and 0s in bank computers, on debit cards, and the like. So why not go all the way?

It is the “logical next step,” after all!

But not every “next step” is advisable. When walking towards a cliff, that next step might be a doozy. And when you are dealing with government and the banks, jumping off a cliff proves an apt metaphor.

Don’t go lemming on me, man.

You can probably guess the usual arguments for getting rid of cash. Convenience, for one. It sure would be convenient for government and central bankers if they could just seize control of money “magically” in the banks’ computers.

Somehow, I am not persuaded. Neither is economist Pierre Lemieux, who provides us with a helpful survey of anti-cash arguments. And when the experts argue that it would be more convenient for consumers, incredulity is the best response. “To argue against the usefulness of cash is to deny the revealed preferences of many individuals,” Lemieux insists. “The fact that cash has not disappeared even in non-criminal hands means that it is convenient for many individuals.”

He expands the thought with an important truth: “Economic efficiency is defined in terms of what individuals want.”

And the purpose of governments is to follow individuals, not corral them, manipulate them . . . for bureaucratic convenience.

Let’s keep cash.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Originally (cc) photo by FamZoo Staff on Flickr

Tags binary, cash, currency, economics, electronic, money

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy property rights

A New Way to Steal

ERAD, gift card, civil asset, forfeiture, stealing, theft, drug war

The fight against government theft of private property, through “civil forfeiture,” just got a little harder.

There’s a new technology available: ERAD card scanners.

And the Oklahoma City Police Department’s joint interdiction team has them, and can use the scanners to take money from you without your consent.

What money, in particular? The money you have stored in pre-paid debit cards.

ERAD stands for Electronic Recovery and Access to Data, and the ERAD Group, Inc., stands to make a lot of cash from the technology. Police around the country want to be able to take the funds secured in debit cards. It’s the latest thing in the war against the war against the War on Drugs.

Drug traffickers, we’re told, hide dozens of such cards in vehicles transporting drugs.

It’s not enough that police can, in the course of investigating a crime — without conviction, mind you; indeed, without charges being filed — confiscate the cards themselves.

The police also want to be able to siphon the money out of those cards.

Which leads to corruption. Which is already rife in civil forfeiture usage, as a recent Oklahoma state audit found — missing money, misused funds, that sort of thing.

The cavalier way in which government officials defend expropriation by ERAD scanners is chilling. In an Oklahoma Watch article, reporter Clifford Adcock relates the official explanation: “These cards are cash, not bank accounts. . . . Individuals do not have privacy rights with magnetic stripe cards.” Why not? Because the information on the strip “literally has no purpose other than to be provided to others to read.”

That’s so open to logical criticism you could drive a confiscated truck fleet through it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags abuse, asset forfeiture, civil asset forfeiture, civil forfeiture, Drug War, ERAD, police, theft

crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard privacy property rights too much government

Taking Our Stuff Back

civil asset forfeiture, police, abuse, robbery, Common Sense

There’s been a big push for criminal justice reform, with some recent progress on civil asset forfeiture.

This is the process through which police and government agencies grab a citizen’s money or property — even if the citizen is never charged with a crime, much less convicted. Then, to get one’s stuff back, a citizen must sue to prove the stuff was innocent of being involved in criminal activity.

Asset forfeiture without a criminal conviction turns our system of justice on its head, encouraging bad behavior by police — ahem, stealing — by rewarding departments and agencies that get to keep the loot.

Reform legislation passed through an Oklahoma House committee earlier this week and now goes to the full House. Television News 9 in Oklahoma City began its report by acknowledging that, “A watered down version of the civil asset forfeiture bill has crossed another hurdle in the state Legislature.”

That’s because a bill to end civil asset forfeiture outright had already failed in the Senate. The currently pending legislation requires that citizens who sue to recover their property and win be awarded their legal fees.

It’s progress . . . but still not justice enough.

Late last month, Wyoming’s Gov. Matt Mead signed reform legislation mandating that there be a probable cause hearing before the legal forfeiture process can begin. Good. But that was after Gov. Mead vetoed a better bill, which stopped all official, convictionless snatching of stuff.

Police taking people’s stuff without having to prove a crime must be ended altogether, abolished. That means we better stop waiting for politicians. Instead, petition this important principle directly to the people — use ballot initiatives in cities and states across the country.

No time like the present.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags asset forfeiture, ballot initiative, civil asset forfeiture, law, police, police abuse

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy too much government

Breaking the Safe

surveillance, privacy, iphone, security, NSA, CIA, FBI, terrorism, illustration

As we tromp repeatedly to the polling booth this year, we should wonder: are we being played?

The answer: yes . . . at least on the issue of Apple’s iPhone security.

I’ve written about this before. Our politicians and government officials are playing demagogue, trying to convert (too successfully?) the electorate into a mob bent on destroying privacy and private property — out of unwarranted fear.

The case for terrorist worries in this case is not even plausible: the FBI waited too long to be convincing, and the NSA supposedly has the metadata anyway. The government doesn’t need the info. It’s after something else.

As former congressman Bob Barr put it, the government’s case is “pure applesauce . . . simply the latest chapter in a decades-long push by Uncle Sam to gain access to Americans’ digital technology and place this booming sector of our economy under its thumb.” He goes on:

[T]he government is for the first time demanding that a company actually invent a way to defeat the very encryption safeguards it builds into the devices it sells. Attorney General Lynch has taken to citing an obscure law, the All Writs Act of 1789, to justify this unprecedented exercise of power to compel companies to do the government’s work for it.

To my knowledge, the government has never demanded that Allied Safe and Vault, or any of its competitors, go out of its way to cook up “a way in” to its security systems.

Government is just trying to retain its old relevance. Folks in power see it slipping. And it is, as Americans outsource their privacy and security not to governments, but, increasingly, to private providers.

That’s a good thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Internet privacy, privacy, security, terrorism

First Amendment rights folly general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies privacy U.S. Constitution

Our Masters’ Malign Agenda

Post author By CS Admin
Post date December 8, 2015
18 Comments on Our Masters’ Malign Agenda

Constitution, Bill of Rights, Politics, Terrorism, populism, Common Sense

Reacting to terrorism, President Obama’s first thought? Scratch out the Second Amendment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of “due process” from the Bill of Rights. Why? To advance his mania for gun control.

Now comes Republican front-runner Donald Trump, one-upping the president. He wants to block any Muslim from entering the U.S. — whether immigrant, refugee or even tourist.

That’s after advocating a government database for tracking American citizens who are Muslim.

Terrorism is winning.

Ignore the Constitution? Disregard individual rights? Demonize an entire religion? Thus our leaders play into ISIS’s hands, encouraging Muslims worldwide to see the U. S. as their enemy.

Cooler heads must prevail. Or else. A Republican friend posted on Facebook that he “would gleefully vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump.” I just cannot muster any glee.

In fact, I’m beginning (again) to wonder if John Fund wasn’t on to something last June, when he wrote in National Review that “just maybe Trump is a double agent for the Left.”

Think “Manchurian Candidate.”

“It’s all very un-American,” my friend Suhail Khan, an American Muslim and conservative activist, told the Washington Post. “Our country was based on religious freedom.”

No more?

Surely, our experiment in limited government has not ended.

But we need to get serious.

We must demand a real commitment from any candidate seeking the country’s highest office. To be entrusted to execute our union’s laws, he or she must actually demonstrate allegiance to the rule of law.

That is, a willingness to fit one’s ego within the confines of the Constitution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags constitution, Donald Trump, Fifth Amendment, first amendment, Hillary Clinton, Islam, terrorism

general freedom nannyism privacy

One, Two or Free?

one child policy, china, family planning, communist, five year plan

The vast majority of Chinese people are celebrating. Last week, the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party decreed that it will cease enforcing the one-child-only policy this coming March — after 35 years — as part of its 13th Five Year Plan.

Just speaking for myself, infanticide, coerced abortions and forced sterilizations seem . . . well, not good. Bad, even. Really bad. Or more precisely, evil, tyrannical and totalitarian . . . you know, if we want to use such “extreme” language.

But not everyone sees it my way.

Back in 1990, Molly Yard claimed that “[t]he Chinese government doesn’t coerce people.” Why, according to this former head of the National Organization of Women, “the only responsible policy [China] can have is to control family planning.” She went all the way: “I consider the Chinese government’s policy among the most intelligent in the world.”

The Los Angeles Times reported in 2012 that China’s “population control efforts have helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and contributed to China’s spectacular economic growth.”

That has not only been disputed — many economists point to policy changes that allowed entrepreneurship and private property — but overturned by reality. The one-child policy has been a disaster. There are now 117 young men for every 100 young women in China, and an aging population without enough youngsters to provide for them.

Alas, the one child policy is not being replaced with reproductive freedom. The government will still limit couples to two kids. That’s better than one, sure. But I have three children. If I were Chinese, I wouldn’t want to give up one of them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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