Comments on: The government as thief https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/the-government-as-thief/ Sat, 07 Feb 2015 01:05:49 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: Edward https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/the-government-as-thief/#comment-709714 Sat, 07 Feb 2015 01:05:49 +0000 http://behindtheblack.com/?p=32826#comment-709714 From the first article: “[government] has required financial institutions to report deposits of $10,000 or more to the Treasury Department, because such large sums of cash are obviously suspicious. You know what else is suspicious? Deposits of less than $10,000, because they suggest an attempt to evade the government’s reporting requirement, which has been a federal crime, known as ‘structuring,’ since 1986.”

So if you are a successful small business with revenues of around $3 million per year, your daily bank deposit will be a little less than $10,000. Thus you are pretty much guaranteed to be suspect.

Who was it that said that we unwittingly commit three felonies a day? Just by engaging in banking transactions, we commit one felony — well, the government can decide to interpret it that way.

The danger of selective enforcement of laws is that we stop being a nation of laws and become a nation of men. In the former, we can be assured that breaking a law will result in prosecution; in the latter, if we know the right people (i.e. make the right bribes), then we won’t be prosecuted for breaking the law. The former is a nation of equality for all, the latter is a nation where some people are more equal.

Civil forfeiture could be considered a form of bribery, as in “we won’t prosecute you for a crime that you didn’t commit, so long as we can keep this money/car/house/whatever.”

What a nice place this country has turned into, where being innocent isn’t enough.

The Constitution may not be perfect, but it is better than what we have now. The Fifth Amendment is very clear that civil forfeiture is illegal: “nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Civil forfeiture bypasses due process. So if government isn’t following the Constitution, what is it following?

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