1/ There are no other constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact Being meaning to write this for 6 months, but the Canadian response to the trucker protests is illustrating this so vividly, that today is the day.
2/ I assume we are in agreement that constitutional democracies are a good form of government or, at least, a better form of government than the other methods we have found to-date. This means that I am taking for granted the following assumptions.
3/ - People have fundamental rights to speech, assembly, religion and so on - People are innocent until proven guilty - The state cannot punish people without due process, which generally means that, in a court of law, the state has to prove you have broken some specific law
4/ If you disagree with the principles above, I guess that is fine (but weird) but probably you can safely exit this thread now because it is unlikely that we are going to agree on anything else.
5/ People who know me IRL (offchain?) know that I have been harassing them for years that "Without the freedom to transact, you have no other constitutional rights" And mostly they look at me strangely and I look at them strangely because it seems obvious to me
6/ Freedom of speech might require such activities like: ✅A website ✅A pamphlet ✅An advertisement ✅Paying a graphic designer ✅Travelling to a different location All of which "cost money"
7/ Freedom of assembly might require such activities like: ✅Taking a train to Washington DC ✅Booking a hotel room ✅Hiring a taxi ✅Buying a hot dog with mustard while you assemble All of which "cost money"
8/ Freedom of religion might require such activities like: ✅Renting a space for a facility ✅Paying the salaries of religious officials ✅Buying food and consumables All of which "cost money" I can go on, but I think the point is clear. The exercise of rights costs money.
9/ Historically, the risk of financial censorship has been much lower because for the literally whole of human history until approximately 2001, it was mostly uncontroversial that people could have decentralized non custodial mediums of exchange
10/ For hundreds of thousands of years humans used commodity money (from cowry shells to gold) and then in the last few hundred years we have had various forms of cash based instruments as well. All of these are "non custodial", "decentralized" and not "KYCed"
11/ Over the last 20 years, the institutional environment has shifted to a posture that non-custodial money is default suspicious: ✅Central banks who want the "death of cash" ✅Patriot Act and derivatives thereof ✅Geopolitical pressure points via the banking system
12/ "But 6529 the goal is preventing money laundering, stopping terrorism and reducing tax evasion" I agree that these are a) the stated goals and b) an actual subset of the actual goals. I am also against: money laundering, terrorism and tax evasion
13/ The problem however is that there is both short-term and long-term goal creep. In the United States (and EU) banks and payment processors have been pressured to cut off accounts to gun shops, adult businesses, crypto businesses and other perfectly legal businesses.
14/ I consider this to be undemocratic. If a country would like to make pornography or guns or cryptocurrency illegal, it has every right to pass laws to do so. And then the citizens can re-elect or de-elect the politicians who voted for it and/or challenge it in court.
15/ What happens instead is hidden "deep bureaucracy" type bullshit where the banks point to their regulators and say "well, they told us to close high risk accounts" and the regulators point to the banks and say "we never said that, just, you know, be careful"
16/ And the net effect is that you don't have an bank account any more and there is no recourse, no due process, not even an actual law that says "you should not have an account" It is "deep bureaucracy" running a parallel opaque unwritten legal system. Deeply undemocratic.
16/ Even in the current system, being unbanked and having to rely on cash is more or less ejecting you from the modern economy. Paying bills, getting a paycheck, paying vendors, investing in 401K, buying crypto even, all require access to traditional payment rails.
17/ But guess what? It is getting worse. Many central banks have stated goals for their CBDCs to: ✅Eliminate cash ✅Allow global transaction censorship ✅Apply deeply negative interest rates
18/ A system of this kind would be the most powerful system of centralized control the world has ever known. Even Stalin, Hitler, Mao did not have the ability to apply global transaction censorship across their empires at the touch of a button
19/ What will happen is some aspiring dictator will censor their opponents' spending during a election period and they won't be able to buy a tomato, let alone run a campaign With such power & no due process, it's a certainty. Power hungry people tend to run for office
20/ Notice that the third goal is mission creep. Nobody started this process in 2001 saying "the goal is to be able to apply negative interest rates to your savings" and yet here we are Below a certain negative rate, people will withdraw their money. So let's prevent them!
21/ The way this process has been working is that we are the frog and we are being boiled slowly. Every year, the reporting requirements get a little broader, the penalties steeper, the restrictions on cash withdrawals more severe.
22/ And most of all the presumption of innocence is turning into a presumption of guilt. "why do you want to withdraw $5K in cash" "if you have nothing to hide, why do you need non-custodial instruments" "non custodial is dangerous"
23/ I remind you that literally for the whole of human history "non custodial" was the main form of the mediums of exchange. It is a very recent concept that this is a bad thing. It is effectively a quiet power grab by the state.
24/ This is why one of the reasons that crypto has been generally disliked by central banks in particular. Here they are, closing in on the 'end of cash' and now a new form of digital cash emerges and, in their view, they need to reel that in too for the rest to work.
25/ So back to constitutional rights: ✅You have constitutional rights ✅You need money to exercise them ✅The state acquires the power to cut off funding What might happen next? I know what happens: "all of 6529 frens think he is overreacting"
26/ At which point I present to you the liberal Prime Minister of G-7 country known for its extreme good nature and general easy-goingness
27/ Prime Minister Trudeau has a political problem. The specific political problem is some truck drivers have blocked part of Canadian cities and highways to protest his COVID-19 policies. This is: a) annoying him, b) annoying his voters and c) probably bad for the economy
28/ I don't actually have a view on the substance of the trucker protests and if Canada's COVID policies are good, bad or neutral. I would further guess that the truckers are probably violating a variety of Canadian laws relating to how they can protest.
29/ What would be a normal constitutional democracy political response to a problem like this is either: a) let it play out if you think it is in good faith or b) encourage the local authorities to arrest them and try them in a court if you think it is not
30/ Either is fine. The right to assembly in Canada probably does not allow you to block the highway for days for everyone else. I assume Canada still has police and courts so they could presumably arrest the highway blockers & take them to court