Police Seized Innocent Peoples Property, Kept It for Years. What Will SCOTUS Do?

In theory, communism can reject the concept of private property, but in practice, all property ownership is "private", as any finite quantity of matter and space must necessarily be controlled by someone in particular at the exclusion of everyone else if it is to be used by anyone at all. So the practical differences are merely aesthetic.

During the Cold War, Soviet states and the socialist economic system they had were propagandized in America as "the government can take your stuff at any time because COMMUNISM". This was aided by the fact that, in practice, the Soviets could and did do that. However, it was not at all a unique feature of socialism or communism. Police states don't care about who nominally owns the economy, they care about what can be looted from it.

Capitalism has no defense mechanisms against unwarranted seizure of property. Private ownership is a precursor to capitalism, not a byproduct of it. Furthermore, there are plenty of ways by which capitalist entities can gain government-like powers, if not totally supplant the government[0]. Concentration of wealth is a problem whether or not the person who owns the wealth claims to own it for themselves or in the name of the working class.

The way that you prevent the government[1] from stealing your stuff is to make it inconvenient for them to do so. In the US, we have presumption of innocence, right to due process, and so on. These are constitutional rights that the government broadly respects. If they regularly didn't, you'd see brain drain as people and businesses with the means to do so would escape the country. Those without such means would begin economically sabotaging the country. However, these are blunt instruments whose use entails personal cost, so people don't use them right away. The US can therefore get away with ignoring its own constitutional obligations some of the time, and in this case, that's how they get away with civil forfeiture.

Think of it like this: when Apple or Google start screwing over developers, or Reddit or Twitter start screwing over users, we don't all immediately jump ship, but some do. If they continue doing this, and they exceed a particular threshold of bullshit, they continue losing people faster than they gain. This creates a feedback loop of stupider and stupider tactics pissing off more and more people until the platform collapses.

Countries work in similar ways.

[0] The basic idea of Rothbardian ancap economics is that we should deliberately encourage this. The idea is that this would supposedly lead to competition for governance. Except this wouldn't actually happen because competition is a byproduct of capitalism, not an essential property of it.

[1] or government-like entities

General data from the US for burglary depends on the source, yea.

If you look at victim data it's roughly it's 3 million burglaries per year, about 1/3 of which are home invasions. And about 1/4 of those (so 1/12 of total) are also violent crimes where the resident is injured.

But then when it comes time to report crime stats some stuff gets partitioned off into other buckets (I guess to avoid double counting? Idk). So e.g. some sources will take those 250k assaults-during-burglary and not count them as burglaries.

It gets really confusing really fast.

If anyone else was curious for more recent data, this 2021 article has the trends through 2019: https://thewhyaxis.substack.com/p/cops-still-take-more-stuff....

Its chart shows that burglary led from 2016-2018, but asset forfeiture was ahead again in 2023.

Articles 11, 17, 6 and 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specify rights to Due Process of law, Property, and Equal Protection of such rights.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

There are 549 translations of the UDHR. https://www.ohchr.org/en/search?f%5B0%5D=event_type_taxonomy...

> Article 11: Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

> No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

> Article 17: Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

> No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

> Article 7: All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.