A reasonable conclusion for advice to a government. Currency controls and manipulation are the most powerful controls nation state governments have. The important question remains, is what is good for the government, good for its people?
Please do more research on the ‘Free Banking Era’, private currency was common.
Crypto is global, inclusionary, no worry about counterfeits, highly liquid, etcetc
Gold, free banking…state-backed currency is the historical exception.
We’ve had plenty of alternatives and most of them have been tried and studied. Having strong central monetary policy has resulted in large societal benefits.
Source?
> You’re probably imagining yourself to be in that 1%
My dream is much simpler. I’d like more time with my wife and daughter.
- has given the banks the right to freeze bank accounts of suspected protesters without evidence and granted the banks full immunity. Even if the banks are mistaken or outright abuse this right, they can never be held liable in a court of law
- has suspended the rights of the accused to defend themselves in a court of law stripping them of all due process rights
- can now force two truck companies to carry out the government’s orders or face severe punishment. The tow truck companies haven’t even been accused of any crime but they have been stripped of their right to autonomy
Civil liberties, once lost, are difficult or impossible to recover. I don’t believe the government can resist using their new powers again, now that the genie is out of the bottle.
The right for dissidents to peacefully protest is essential to the functioning of a healthy democracy. With these latest moves, the Canadian people are decidedly less free. I don’t think the loss of freedoms was worth the price. This time the government targeted a movement that many Canadians disagree with, let’s hope for your sake they never target a minority you personally support, lest you suddenly find yourself unbanked.
> Civil liberties, once lost, are difficult or impossible to recover. I don’t believe the government can resist using their new powers again, now that the genie is out of the bottle.
It might be new in Canada but governments have been doing this (using similar emergency laws) during the pandemic for a while. An anti-authoritarian person may feel that's extremely scary, while someone else may ask what else should a government do to prevent millions from dying, given that there are no pandemic-specific laws.
I understand how frustrating this is for Canadians who don't agree with either the protesters message or their tactics, but the suspending civil liberties for all Canadians is a dangerous precedent. It should only be used as a last resort and I don't think the Canadian Gov has exercised all their existing legal options yet.
> What could the government do?
1. The leader of the Canadian government is the leader of all Canadians, even those he doesn't agree with. Rather than paint the entire protest movement as racist, misogynists with unacceptable views, one reasonable first tactic could have been to engage in dialogue with the protesters to hear out their grievances, perhaps with the aid of a mediator. Dialogue leads to de-escalation, marginalizing dissidents leads to escalation as we have seen here.
2. Before resorting to suspending civil liberties, access to the courts and due process, perhaps the government could have started by enforcing the laws already on the books. This is what they did at the Windsor-Detroit border and it appears they were able to end the blockade without violence from either side. It appears that in Ottawa, the police were reluctant to enforce the existing laws. This is a different problem and pretending the government had no choice but to employ draconian measures is disingenuous.
"Illegal" is whatever the government decides. In Canada, they have written broad laws to make most forms of protest illegal. I am annoyed by protests for things I don't care about (or even dislike), but I acknowledge that protest has an extremely important place in democracy. It has been the force for positive change throughout history. To acquiesce to the de facto position that protesting should be illegal - and that is the effective message here - underscores a profound lack of understanding of the importance of the deeply democratic act.
I can't recall the exact Monty Python line, but the sentiment seems appropriate now: "you may protest in the designated protesting square in the fenced section behind parliament. Just don't make any noise."
To quote the infamous American Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, "the whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable."
If the answer is close enough to "no", then you know this is not a democracy.