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And that interest should be something draconian, like what payday lenders charge. If your money gets tied up for years, it ought to come back doubled.
by RIMR 5y ago
And that interest should be something draconian, like what payday lenders charge. If your money gets tied up for years, it ought to come back doubled.
- bityard 5y agoWho should pay for that? Taxpayers?
- thelittlenag 5y agoYes. Its "our" justice system. The liabilities and costs go along with the benefits.
- klyrs 5y agoSo long as the police line their coffers with forfeitures, they should pay whatever associated costs. If this isn't profitable enough for them, too bad.
- harperlee 5y agoYou are attacking the problem on the wrong side. They should have never been able to profit from that.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoWhy not attack on both sides? I absolutely agree that they should never have been able to profit from that. But, while we work on removing their ability to profit from it, why not also make it less profitable when they abuse it?
- harperlee 5y agoFair point! Makes absolute sense for me.
- klyrs 5y agoAgreed, but I'm entertaining the notion that civil forfeiture remains legal.
- harperlee 5y agoYes. Taxpayers, voters, citizens. Theirs is the government money, and if the government does something bad, they need to compensate. Don’t like it? Put your rights in motion until these things don’t happen.
- nybble41 5y ago> Theirs is the government money, and if the government does something bad, they need to compensate. Theirs is the money the government takes. Taxpayers (as such) are fellow victims. Voters may have supported the government's actions or opposed them—would you punish the opposition, who are on the victim's side, merely for not having sufficient numbers to prevent it? The government claims to act on behalf of taxpayers / voters / citizens, but (once elected, if applicable) they make their own decisions about the form of that action; there is no agent/principal relationship here where the principals (citizens) would have specific knowledge of and control over the actions of their agent (the government). If people in the government choose to do something bad then those specific people need to compensate the victims; the fact that they claim, unilaterally, to be acting for someone else does not in any way deflect their personal liability for the consequences of their own choices. Those who are most directly responsibly for the illegitimate seizures should bear the majority of the cost. That would be the individual officers who carried out the seizure, their superiors at the police department and in the state and federal government, and any judges who sign off on warrants which are later ruled invalid.
- nybble41 5y agoThe police departments should pay for that. And they should be privately funded, so that the payments come out of their profits.
- klyrs 5y agoI'm somewhat amused by this investment vehicle you've proposed. Hire a sketchy-looking dude in a van missing a taillight to courier your cash. He gets popped, but isn't doing anything illegal, maybe has a pre-rolled joint in the glove box, so they seize your cash. Every day it's tied up, you're getting serious returns. Eventually, submit the courier contract to prove that the cash wasn't being used for crimes, and reap that interest. I see this cop-baiting practice getting criminalized long before civil forfeiture.
- stainforth 5y agoOne is real and happening right now and the other is something you've imagined.
- klyrs 5y agoThis is all in the context of a hypothetical policy, yes. Credit to RIMR's imagination, not mine. My corollary here is that it probably won't happen, in part, because of shenanigans.
- RIMR 5y agoI know this thread is a week old, but the nonsense about the arrested-courier-for-hire was entirely the product of your imagination, not mine. I don't even know how you logically arrived at that conclusion.