Tacking on the conversation about arbitrary and static dollar amounts in law. There's an interesting effect where law makers can pass a law with static dollar

Tacking on the conversation about arbitrary and static dollar amounts in law. There's an interesting effect where law makers can pass a law with static dollar amounts that seems reasonable at the time, but the force of inflation covertly expands the scope of the state's authority deeper and deeper into the society without any further action or political risk by present lawmakers. A great example of this is the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires reporting of transactions greater than $10,000 to the federal government. At the time it was passed in 1970, $10k was the equivalent of ~$70k in 2021 dollars. $70k actually seems like a pretty reasonable amount as that's a very large transfer that the average person does very rarely for mostly legitimate reasons, like buying a house. It's easy to justify why the feds could use this data to investigate large scale criminals and money laundering. But as inflation has stripped away the value of the dollar, more and more people and activities are falling into that $10k limit. Basically, the surveillance state gets to sneakily expand when laws are pegged to a currency that's constantly inflating by design.