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Comment by mythrwy | Hacker News Reader

You bring up a good point about private services suddenly being able to cut people off from banking.

But if governments had that power what might happen?

Governments have that power already. Various AML legislation can make any high street bank to not only block your account without reason util you prove your innocence, you can't even withdraw any of your money in cash. It happened to me in the UK, my account blocked with no reason for weeks until I summited all documentation. I was a foreign student at the time, almost destroyed me, no money for rent etc.

In any case, it's a orthogonal issue, government power vs democratic accountability, the highly regulated private banking system certainly does not protect you against it, they will do whatever the government asks of them as long as they can maintain their key rent extraction monopolies.

The government already has that power - there are lists of people that banks aren't allowed to do business with, because the government says so.

Not nearly to the extent directly controlling all transactions would give them. Not even close.

What you are talking about is things like sanctioning foreign firms or individuals. Yes, the IRS could also come after your bank accounts but it takes some work and isn't suitable for mass population control.

This is and that's unacceptable.

It would be subject to a lot more scrutiny and due process?

I'm not sure how to figure out which situation results in more scrutiny and due process. I can buy that private corporations are under-policed, but I'm not sure the government would police itself either. Maybe the best is a kind of adversarial relationship between the public and private entities? Anyone know of compelling studies on what ultimately is best practice for compliance?

> I'm not sure the government would police itself either

One would assume that if the law was intended that everyone can have a bank account, then ultimately one would be able to appeal through the courts. Which are not perfect, but are a hell of a lot better than a company just being able to make it's own decision without having to justify it.

Of course, you could have a governmental setup without this aim. And you could regulate the private market. But generally speaking governmental organisations are held to higher standards and have less incentive to be non-compliant.

> But generally speaking governmental organisations are held to higher standards and have less incentive to be non-compliant

Citation needed. I’ve seen precisely the opposite. What’s needed is external pressure to be a good actor. The courts can do that to a government - in a country with very strong institutions. With a decent number of competing banks and a strong regulator, you can get very far

> One would assume that if the law was intended that everyone can have a bank account, then ultimately one would be able to appeal through the courts

Maybe we should first socialize the legal industry, such that suing the government is actually a realistic option for the common person who, at present, cannot afford to hire lawyers for something like that.

> I'm not sure the government would police itself either

Has it ever?

There's clearly _some_ push-and-shove that happens some of the time, officials get fired for ethics violations, laws get changed, politicians lose re-election. I don't think it's worthwhile to be reductive, there's got to be a quantitative way to compare how different compliance schemes tend to fare.

And political wrangling. And moral panics. And "national emergencies". And just about every other political abuse you can imagine.

That's without getting into the weeds of how well they would do at it implementation or how much it would cost.

Government could just do all the farming and manufacturing and food distribution also. Probably not very well and people would be much worse off and the system would be abused by those in power. Same concepts apply to this.

Single responsibility principal, as much as possible, is an efficient idea.

Government's job is to regulate. If there are problems with the current system that is largely a failure of regulation.

If there were government bank accounts, there wouldn't be instances of banks closing accounts for people's politics. The government bank would have to issue accounts for everyone because of first amendment protections

Then people could choose. The choice cuts both ways by providing a pragmatic path for government market constraint as an alternative to the cat and mouse games of exquisitely intricate regulations.

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