For a long time, if you lived a "blameless life," you had little to fear from the police, but the Gonzalez case brings to mind a new fact that should scare a lot of people who try to lead good, clean lives:
In the South Texas city of San Juan, population 26,200, police have begun seizing ever greater amounts by taking both cash and vehicles from motorists. In 2005, officers collected $4400. This year, however, the force has collected $67,000. Pharr, with a population of 47,000, collected $422,000 last year. McAllen, a bigger city with 106,000 residents, collected $484,000. A federal appeals court ruling this week concluded that driving with a large amount of cash is sufficient justification for police to confiscate it, even if there is no evidence that a crime has been committed.
The point is that you can be someone who is not doing drugs, has never done them, has no involvement in the vice trade in general, pays your taxes and the police can take your money anyway without having to give it back to you. The fact that it is stupid to carry around very large amounts of cash is not irrelevant to the fact that the police can literally steal from you on the grounds that they just don't trust you carrying that much cash. What else can you call it, but pure theft, when someone can take your property without any good reason other than they just don't trust you?
Despite the fact that I am a (classical) liberal (or libertarian, if you prefer), I don't support the use of drugs anymore than the average social conservative does. However, the constant in the fight to keep up the war on drugs has been a terrifying amount of damage to our legal system. The kind of ends-justify-the-means mentality involved will reduce our country to being a bonafide banana republic in another generation if it's not stopped dead in its tracks. It should terrify every traditionalist that a cop can simply grab their cash and walk away with it because a court ruled that mere possession of large amounts of cash is probably evidence of a connection to the drug trade.
I hate the fact that I have nothing to add to that. Props.
It's about as substantial as being convicted of a thought crime. It's as if they're saying, "well if you have this kind of cash, you must be up to no good". How ordinary citizens can sit still for this is beyond me. Don't they understand the threat to their own way of life?!?
Of course, this $10,000 "limit" has a couple of other great "side-benefits" for the Fascist controllers (and the coming "Mark otB") --
for one, it makes it VERY hard to move the "fruit of your labor" without Big Brother and FINCEN from watching every penny of it - and confiscating, of course, if necessary. Want to escape the coming police state Dictatorship? Ain't as easy as it used to be...
Finally, don't forget that $10K used to be Real Money - now it buys only about a third as much as it did just a few short years ago - and it'll probably be barely enough to worry about a few years hence.
My plan is to buy land, guns and precious metal. I don't know how much of that I will really own, but I want to have a decent little chunk of all three. And... unlike most Christians, I will raise my kids to understand their true relationship with most police departments once they are old enough to understand those things.
There is probably more here than meets the eye. If $120,000 was claimed to be found, the actual amount discovered in this guy's possession was probably more in the $500K-$1M range.
Well, it would be interesting to do a lifestyle audit on that police force, then wouldn't it? When the responding cop arrives to work in an Aston Martin Vanquish or Ferrari that was paid for in cash, I think that'll be the first clue that you were right.
Caught with his hand in the cookie jar
Anyone remember the Gonzalez case that I blogged about a few weeks ago? Remember how I have been saying that the War on Drugs has been *ahem* "problematic" for police professionalism and ethics? Well, once again, I was right: Dallas...