FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees

Make no mistake, this was absolutely about shutting people up that they don't agree with. The harassment we're actually seeing in any tangible form is coming from the rioters.

Here's one off of the top of my head; it may be very imprecise:

1. Every Bank in the United States of America 2. Every NMLS licensed mortgage lender in USA 3. Every FINRA licensed investment advisor, broker, or trader 4. Eventually, every public school system in the USA.

All of these organizations participate because they're required to by law, or through "self-regulation" that's effectively the same as government coercion. And, they do have good reasons for wanting to; cases 1-3 are attempts to stop financial fraudsters from finding employment at their firm. The excuse for case 4 is to stop pedophiles or something (that one I'm actually less familiar with than the other three).

Now that you have this list, what are you going to do with it? Moralize at Bank of America until they relax their hiring standards? Wait for the market to produce a bank that doesn't do background checks on employees, and then do all of your business there? Call you Congressman and demand they do something about this terrible injustice (even though this mess was created by people calling their Congressman and demanding they do something about the fraudsters on Wall Street that destroyed the economy in 2008)?

What would that accomplish, besides creating a new group to be fingerprinted? This rap back thing is being motivated by the desires of financial trade unions to "self-regulate" to prevent fraud. You don't think techie trade union would turn around and insist on this also to keep the supply of cheap labor low?

> We've already lost when an arrest is equivalent to a conviction.

Doesn't even take an arrest these days - just ask any college aged male accused of rape.

Not necessarily. I know it's often used this way in practice, but this is also partly because people perpetuate the notion that you must be a libertarian to believe in such notions, and that sensible liberals are supposed to be in favor of a large state capable of solving any social problem.

Well, I think that's not true.

There's certainly room on the ideological spectrum for a kind of "liberal minarchism", for the lack of better term. If you think about it, conventional minarchist right-wing libertarianism is often defined by "state as small as it needs to be protect its citizens from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud". But this formula has two parts, each of which can be adjusted independently.

If you take the second part - the list of goals - and add "..., to provide for a basic standard of living, and to constrain economic inequality within reasonable levels", then you basically have a liberal minarchist credo. With libertarianism, it shares the central idea that state is a necessary evil, and it must be only as big as it needs to be, and no bigger. With mainstream liberalism, it shares the desired goals.

In practice, the difference is how you approach the expansion of government. Mainstream liberals often see any expansion that tries to solve some social problem as good, regardless of how important that problem is, and whether non-government solutions exist. A minarchist approach is to start with the premise that any expansion is unnecessary, and require clear justification, with evidence, as to why it is actually necessary.

Would it result in lower taxes? Probably, but that's not the point. The point is to ensure that the government doesn't become a juggernaut that can be easily repurposed for oppression.