In case anyone was silly enough to think that modern policing had anything to do with protecting the public.
Civil forfeiture is one of those things that seems plainly unconstitutional, insofar as the burden of proof is put on the accused. It’s also bad to give law enforcement a financial incentive.
Inflation will take care of this. Soon it will be commonplace for people to carry around large sums of cash, particularly on payday before going down to the currency exchange to get cartons of unbroken packs of Marlboros and Kents. Also, it will be more common to have possession of a couple of cases of cigarettes.
Until I found out that one cannot freely take large sums of cash and gold across national borders, it seemed a cinch to make bazillions exploiting the arbitrage opportunities in gold versus the dollar, mark and yen. Most of the time, the price of gold as expressed in dollars, marks and yen was inconsistent with exchange rates for dollars vs. yen, yen vs. marks and marks vs. dollars. I imagined becoming a frequent flier on the Concorde just so I could take physical delivery of gold in whatever country offered the cheapest gold, and then flying to wherever it was most expensive and selling it. Is this how George Soros got rich? (The US is easy to get in and out of, but I bet it is hard to go from Mexico to Zurich without having your gold stash checked at customs.)
That car is my car, a white Cadillac DTS. I was arrested by ATF for carrying a contraband copy of Economic Sophisms.
They confiscated my clubs, too, and a bag of chemical fertilizer.
Gotta go. The warden wants me to shine his shoes and prepare a letter about taxes and the future of interest rates.
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Just to polish Jane Jacobs’s apple once more, in Systems of Survival she pointed out that the Guardian Ethic and the Trader Ethic were largely contrary when not mutually exclusive. They are not just different. When the police make money their motive, we get this. The opposite side of the ledger comes from busineses falling into rent-seeking, using the government as their guns. (The MS13 and other gangs in business have guns of their own.)
A couple of years back (2009), attention was focused on the town of TENAHA, TEXAS, which waylayed travelers to relieve them of cash. Before that, 60 Minutes did an expose on Florida police engaged in the same crimes.
After watching an Untouchables starring Robert Stack (1959), I got Eliot Ness’s book from the library. Young Ness did not create the image of the unbribable cop, but he did capitalize on it. That he could speaks volumes. Corruption was not new then, but has gotten old now.
That’s depressing as h*ll.
