4 ms·
It's certainly true that there's a line, but i've never heard a principled case for why they ought to be different. Money and speech are really not much differe
by darawk 4y ago
It's certainly true that there's a line, but i've never heard a principled case for why they ought to be different. Money and speech are really not much different in terms of their power to organize problematic activity.
Certainly dragnet surveillance of speech could prevent a fair amount of terrorism, mass shootings, child pornography, etc. Dragnet surveillance of money flows accomplishes that too.
We just as a society decided it was worth it in the case of speech, but for some reason have decided the opposite in the case of money, except when that money is physical cash. None of this seems particularly well grounded in any kind of principled argument for one vs the other.
The benefits to anonymity and privacy are always highly diffuse and hard to observe, particularly in the moment. In another comment you ask for someone to enumerate the upsides, but i'd ask you the same question for speech privacy. What are the upsides to you being able to talk to your friends without the government listening in?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> i've never heard a principled case for why they ought to be different. Money and speech are really not much different in terms of their power to organize problematic activity Speech is more primitive, and far less dependent on community efforts, than money. We can theorise working societies without money. I don't think we can do similarly without speech, at least not without changing what it means to be human.
- solveit 4y ago> We can theorise working societies without money. Really? At scales larger than a few hundred people?
- rurp 4y agoSure, there have probably been thousands of such societies throughout history. Bartering was common for many hunter gatherer communities. Having a standard currency isn't very practical if you have many groups across a large geographical area that meet sporadically. Directly trading goods would work just fine in those cases.
- vaidhy 4y agoHow did they agree on what the exchange rate should be? From my understanding, the answer was almost always plunder among the primitive societies or a tyrant/king enforcing a monetary system. There was really no bartering amongst equals across communities.
- darawk 4y agoFirstly I don't think that's actually true in any meaningful sense. I mean, yes, literally we could have a completely trivial society without something resembling money, but at even the most rudimentary levels of social organization that actually exist among humans, something resembling money exists. Certainly at the very least, the excahnge of value is occurring between people in anything that could reasonably be called "society". Secondly, even if we accept that speech is "more primitive", i'm not sure why that implies anything about how they ought to be regulated.