4 ms·

What's the point of surveilling the movements of average citizens' money? They usually don't hide anyway. I suppose tax evaders were the target all along, with

• LocalH 1y ago
  Control
  • nine_k 1y ago
    My point that authorities already exercised enough control over normal citizens anyway. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and never cared to have a bank account in Switzerland, let alone an anonymous bank account. But the few certain Americans, and especially non-Americans, who did apparently bothered the US administration enough.
    • kelnos 1y ago
      I think you're missing the point. I honestly don't think the rich people with hidden bank accounts really bothered those in power that much. Why would they; those people are their friends, in many cases. People in power want more power. They want more control, even over average, law-abiding people. They want to moralize and tell you what you should be buying and consuming. Power over others is the goal; it's not incidental. The random Swiss bank account holder is the pretext, not the reason.
    • alexey-salmin 1y ago
      Nah, it's always the middle class that gets screwed. Poor can't be squeezed for more, rich have resources to fight back, the middle class ends up paying for everyone.
      • Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
        Exactly! This is so so true that words can't explain it. The middle class gets extracted as much as they can. I think we middle class are treated as cash cows.
• sneak 1y ago
  If you can make private and uncensorable payments, you can pay an army. The “only one army” concept is how governments remain governments. If you could raise and pay a competing army, the state’s monopoly on “legitimate” violence becomes threatened. This is why most states also heavily restrict private access to arms. Interestingly enough, it is also why the United States explicitly protected it: to specifically prepare for (and protect the right to) violent revolution.
  • mothballed 1y ago
    17% of the USA smokes weed (makes them a prohibited possessor), 8+% are felons, DV convictions are harder to find but incredibly common, 4+% of USA are immigrants who have no right to bear arms (illegal or non-immigrant visa). So maybe 1/4 or more of the adult USA is explicitly barred from the right to bear arms. When you consider those same people would have been much of the ~3% that had high enough risk tolerance to fight the American revolution, basically the USA has barred a very large proportion of those with the risk taking temperament that would enable them to become part of the ~3%. They've effectively made it illegal for revolution type of risk taker to have arms unless those risk takers used the police/military as that outlet. Note this is a relatively new development -- the M1 carbine was invented by a prisoner inside a prison!
    • novok 1y ago
      If you knew the attitude those people had towards having "illegal small arms", you'd realize that isn't much of a barrier. It's kind of like the equivalent of bit torrent for them. Often it's easier to buy an illegal gun even if they are legally allowed to than to buy it legally used or new. They only avoid it because it's a conviction escalator if caught. Also you can own guns on a non-immigrant visa as a resident if you have a local hunting license that are pretty easy to get and maintain. Even non residents can with hunting trips.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  • 1y ago
• lotyrin 1y ago
  You justify surveillance in the wake of terrorist attacks, etc. and when public sentiment toward government is mostly good (the financial surveillance here is an example) You make moves to constrict the available information and permitted behavior of residents and citizens in excess of what is defined by law through pressure on culture and public marketplaces, etc. and not legal action by government. (e.g. the stuff going on with erotic content on Steam recently, but not limited to stuff like that). You start with more questionable and controversial things like e.g. sexually explicit content, then progress to all content or ideas that are inconvenient to your regime. You boil the frog of authority over the public at a rate where only a minority starts noticing problems and looking for solutions in educating themselves using politically inconvenient media (and flagging themselves as enemies in the surveillance tools) or taking action that is inconvenient to you You start making court cases against these inconvenient people and start deporting them or incarcerating them. First with e.g. illegal immigrants or foreign national students that are saying things that are unpopular, but slowly escalate to all the people that disagree with you. If you don't think all these things are well established, I'm not sure what to tell you.
  • nine_k 1y ago
    Yes. Sadly, 9/11 is the classic case of terrorists having won :(
    • kelnos 1y ago
      It's not really that, though. The people who won are those in power, at home. They were handed a pretext to increase their control and surveillance of their citizens.
      • lotyrin 1y ago
        It's my favorite thing about "Inside Job" conspiracies. Whether authority has covertly orchestrated an event behind the scenes or if they were quietly and deliberately lax in preventing the event, if they were just incompetent, or simply failed through no fault of their own: the event has now happened, so the important bit is that they have overtly capitalized on it to create policies with harmful consequences.
• xenotux 1y ago
  > What's the point of surveilling the movements of average citizens' money? The most important is taxation. People pay their babysitters or gardeners under the table, or transact with friends and family without reporting income, and this is a huge amount of lost tax revenue. Another reason are policy options. For one, there are certain decidedly "non-terrorist" goods and services that the government might not want you to purchase. Heck, in the era of ZIRP, many economists were seriously talking about negative interest rates. You can't do that if a person has the option of taking out cash and hiding it under the mattress.
  • tomrod 1y ago
    Once again, Georgism/land value tax is the superior tax policy. Simpler enforcement.
    • mothballed 1y ago
      Tariffs also make sense, since all that stuff is going through and declared to customs anyway, although it might be an economically inferior mechanism. Either way the income tax is one of the most dystopian ways to collect tax as it pretty much relies on mass surveillance of domestic activities to be implemented fairly or effectively.
      • tomrod 1y ago
        Neoclassical economics recognizes, under the standard macro model, that labor taxation is second best. The first-best is capital taxation, once and for all time, but due to time inconsistency (nothing prevents a government from taxing again in the future) it fails to be useful outside of theory. There is some squishiness once you consider overlapping generations model, arguably more realistic than infinitely lived agents (which I always felt represent companies or familial dynasties more than real people). Land value taxation is different because there is no meaningful growth or loss of the capital stock.
        • mothballed 1y ago
• csomar 1y ago
  Unless you have a regular 9-5 job (bonus point if it's government), most small businesses and sole traders are evading taxes (not just optimizing). Also, your ability to increase taxes is tightly linked to your ability to collect it. So by surveying transactions, you are able to increase taxes.