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The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

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Re: The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

#41

Post by jalapenos »

ajb wrote: post #6

Seizures allowed to be kept by the organisation doing the seizing is a terrible incentive. In other countries, seizures go to general revenue, which means that the incentive to do it is diluted enormously. This is especially a problem with small police forces, or small polities where fines become a large proportion of revenue. You'd think that for the FBI the incentive would be diluted, given how huge they are, but m…

There's such an odd deference to the perpetrator's chosen language here.

If I go take someone's wallet, I don't get to get away with calling it a "seizure", "forfeiture", or "revenue". It'd be called theft or robbery, and I'd go to prison.

There's something infantile about how we go along with the state's fictions and pretenses rather than just calling their wording of "civil forfeiture" by its natural wording of "robbery".

I think the origin of this the formation of "district attorneys", followed by only allowing them to prosecute, as well as professional police forces. This is a sharp deviation from and degradation of common law, which used to allow anyone to initiate a prosecution against anyone, and which levied the responsibility of law enforcement on everyone.

Re: The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

#42

Post by egorfine »

harimau777 wrote: post #36
egorfine wrote: post #32

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a sort of bank or a financial system where money couldn’t be moved without the owner’s explicit permission? Like, at all. Perhaps the rules could be enforced with code, and with digital signatures required for any ledger changes. Would be nice if it were globally distributed in a p2p fashion with no government having a say. If only such a system existed.

That works great until the user's explicit permission is coerced or scammed out of them. In those situations it's nice to have the protections of a conventional financial system.

Agreed.

But wouldn't it be nice to have a choice?

Re: The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

#43

Post by hiatus »

harimau777 wrote: post #36
egorfine wrote: post #32

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a sort of bank or a financial system where money couldn’t be moved without the owner’s explicit permission? Like, at all. Perhaps the rules could be enforced with code, and with digital signatures required for any ledger changes. Would be nice if it were globally distributed in a p2p fashion with no government having a say. If only such a system existed.

That works great until the user's explicit permission is coerced or scammed out of them. In those situations it's nice to have the protections of a conventional financial system.

Those protections exist with significant limitations in the conventional financial system. See the widespread abuse of Zelle as an example.

Re: The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

#44

Post by nick__m »

brabel wrote: post #28
potato3732842 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current civil engineering best practices is that if a sufficient amount of traffic is violating the limit the limit is what's wrong. Several states use methods consistent with this to set their speed limits generally. Many do not. Regardless, this is a distraction. Law is the codification of acceptable behavior. Rules that come with force of law should not substantially deviate from what average people consider accep…

> Law is the codification of acceptable behavior. Good luck lobbying the town to change the speed limit. They don't care what you think about the limit, if you drive past that speed you'll have to pay. And just to rant a bit: as someone who lives on a too-straight street (but very local and with pedestrians, including, children, walking on often) where dickheads constantly drive well past the limit because they proba…

The problem is that the road design doesn't fit its usage. In an ideal world the street would be redesign so the driver naturally adopt the desired speed limit.

Re: The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

#45

Post by hiatus »

BirAdam wrote: post #15
jmyeet wrote: post #3

Civil asset forfeiture is legalized theft. Worse, it should be slam-dunk unconstitutional (unreasonable search and seizure, due process) but thus far courts have done what they do most of the time: sided with law enforcement. The legal justification is so laughably bogus too ("the money has no rights"... yeah but who does that money belong to?).

The USA is post-Constitutional. There is nothing in the Constitution that permits the government to create the FBI and therefore the 10th should apply. As the FBI does exist, along with all of the other alphabet soup agencies, we can see that the Constitution no longer truly holds power.

Who would enforce federal laws if there were no federal law enforcement agencies?

Re: The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

#46

Post by spwa4 »

f_devd wrote: post #10
potato3732842 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General revenue is barely better. It's probably worse in many cases becase the elected part of the government can ask the thugs to seize harder to keep money coming in and then kick it back to them in the form of resource allocation or preferential treatment. That's how every speed trap town operates The only solution is to let the petty drug dealers get away with their cars and let the mob bosses get away with their…

If the last few years should have showed anything it's how little the elected officials typically care about balancing, let alone create excess, budget.

Exactly. Even Trump, whose main policy promise was reducing spending, is currently 12% over budget (4% budget increase requested from congress + 8% that he's actually overspent so far)

Re: The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

#47

Post by spwa4 »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #37
potato3732842 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General revenue is barely better. It's probably worse in many cases becase the elected part of the government can ask the thugs to seize harder to keep money coming in and then kick it back to them in the form of resource allocation or preferential treatment. That's how every speed trap town operates The only solution is to let the petty drug dealers get away with their cars and let the mob bosses get away with their…

Why not have the revenue go to victims of crime? Setup a general fund so that judges can allocate recovered funds to help the worst affected.

Because then some people make a career out of causing crimes.

Re: The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

#48

Post by teeray »

potato3732842 wrote: post #8
ajb wrote: post #6

Seizures allowed to be kept by the organisation doing the seizing is a terrible incentive. In other countries, seizures go to general revenue, which means that the incentive to do it is diluted enormously. This is especially a problem with small police forces, or small polities where fines become a large proportion of revenue. You'd think that for the FBI the incentive would be diluted, given how huge they are, but m…

General revenue is barely better. It's probably worse in many cases becase the elected part of the government can ask the thugs to seize harder to keep money coming in and then kick it back to them in the form of resource allocation or preferential treatment. That's how every speed trap town operates The only solution is to let the petty drug dealers get away with their cars and let the mob bosses get away with their…

Perhaps distributing among a large list of charities would be better. “A large list” would help prevent gaming the system with police / fire charities or something.

Re: The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

#49

Post by energy123 »

BirAdam wrote: post #15
jmyeet wrote: post #3

Civil asset forfeiture is legalized theft. Worse, it should be slam-dunk unconstitutional (unreasonable search and seizure, due process) but thus far courts have done what they do most of the time: sided with law enforcement. The legal justification is so laughably bogus too ("the money has no rights"... yeah but who does that money belong to?).

The USA is post-Constitutional. There is nothing in the Constitution that permits the government to create the FBI and therefore the 10th should apply. As the FBI does exist, along with all of the other alphabet soup agencies, we can see that the Constitution no longer truly holds power.

[flagged]

Re: The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

#50

Post by energy123 »

logicchains wrote: post #20
ninetyninenine wrote: post #9

The problem here is nobody will be fired and no one will go to jail for this. It’s like the government is suing itself and paying its own fine to itself. For cases like this a corporation or government body should not be allowed to be an abstraction. The right thing to do is not go after corporations but individuals. It’s unfortunate we don’t do this and I think we should.

You've hit the nail on the head. A huge number of the problems in society today stem from how acting for a government or corporation allows people to get away with doing bad things that they'd be punished for it acting as an individual.

It's about aligning incentives effectively. The fear of jail time for incorrect behavior will work better than anything else.
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