Thread: There are no other constitutional rights wo freedom to transact
twitter.com
twitter.com
Political views are not a protected class.
This is not rocket science; piss people off, they have every right in the world to not do deals with you. If that hurts your ability to exercise your rights, you probably shouldn't have done those things.
If laws are being broken, arrest the perpetrators and charge them with a crime. Follow the judicial process. What is happening here has very little oversight and seems to be an entirely disproportionate response.
You say that institutions have the right to 'not do deals with you', but that's not what's happening. Business is being explicitly instructed not to do business with them, what if they want to offer their services?
It's not simply the 'ability to exercise rights', it is denial of a fundamental aspect of living; being able to transact with your peers. Historically this wouldn't have been such an issue, but as 'non-custodial' money is fast disappearing, it poses risks for all of us.
Are you suggesting an 'eye for an eye' penal code? e. g. you would suggest punishing an arsonist by burning their house down?
(Of course not but I guess anything is ok when you disagree with the protest to begin with)
As I said in another comment, this is the expectation in other areas of law enforcement, so it makes sense to apply that here.
However I did already answer this, you arrest people that are breaking the law and charge them with a crime. Unless we're now happy enough to simply let politicians be judge, jury and executioner; targeting citizens as and when they see fit?
And do you think literally nothing negative should happen to you at the hand of the government until you're convicted of a crime? Should police refuse to use force against someone actively breaking into a home, just because the burglar is just a "suspect"?
Courts will be involved if a crime is being committed, but more importantly a right (you believe in) is being violated. The government is, in every other situation, expected to step in to provide immediate relief to the physical violation of the right to conduct commerce (again, the right you believe in) of the Canadian citizens. This is no different.
> Should police refuse to use force against someone actively breaking into a home, just because the burglar is just a "suspect"?
No, the government is empowered to arrest the trespasser based on reasonable suspicion that a crime is taking place. And that's what they do.
> Courts will be involved if a crime is being committed
No, the role of the court is determine whether a crime has been committed.
> This is no different.
Which is exactly why the twitter thread points out that the only correct course of action in a country with a functional rule of law is to arrest the protesters/trespassers, remove their vehicles from the streets, charge them, and follow the established due process under the law to determine their guilt and punishment. It appears the first step of this process is underway as we speak.
I have no problem whatsoever stopping any protestors who are doing what this group is now doing. Their message does not matter.
> No, the government is empowered to arrest the trespasser based on reasonable suspicion that a crime is taking place. And that's what they do.
Exactly, and there's a reasonable suspicion of a crime taking place here, so we're in agreement.
> No, the role of the court is determine whether a crime has been committed.
Semantics. The role of the court is to sort out what happened later, not to immediately intervene in a given crisis situation.
> Which is exactly why the twitter thread points out that the only correct course of action in a country with a functional rule of law is to arrest the protesters/trespassers, remove their vehicles from the streets, charge them, and follow the established due process under the law to determine their guilt and punishment. It appears the first step of this process is underway as we speak.
Yes, and part of that first step is to deprive them of resources they would use to resist, which is exactly what is happening.
Right, this is the Chinese "social credit" concept of justice. In the US, this concept finds its most widespread application in civil forfeiture (which I'm guessing you also support), where is is said to justify the theft of peoples money and assets in the absence of any charges or due process.
In this particular case, the Canadian federal govenrment is looking to prohibit companies from providing any financial services-- including bank accounts, tansfers, loans, mortgages, insurance, etc.-- indefinitely, to any designated person, who the regulations define as those who are "directly or indirectly" participating in a "public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace". This explicilty includes "indirect" supporters, so anyone who donated a few bucks is now in the crosshairs of a martial law action which has never been used in Canadian history up to this point. And nothing in the regulations states or implies that these measures are temporary.
Defending this action puts you solidly in the authoritarian camp. Wind back a few decades, and it was people like you who defended the government's relentless extrajudicial pursuit of civil rights movement leaders, who arguably did far more damage to the "commerce" which you hold so dear.
Nothing "negative" should happen until you're convicted (perhaps inconvenience), in that you should be considered innocent until proven guilty. If you are a burglar caught in someone elses property there is reasonable suspicion that a crime was committed, however force should not be the first response; if the burglar is cooperative when caught then why should the police use force? If you've been wrongfully arrested and held, compensation should be available. Courts are involved to prove that the accused committed a crime, until judgement is passed the suspect is innocent.
More importantly, how does a financial institution measure the evidence? How do they assure that the individual is involved in the protest? What happens if your money is frozen and you're innocent, if you were wrongfully flagged? Who gets to decide what is considered a level of participation worthy of having your assets frozen?
The crazy part is, even traditional criminals are not treated this harshly. If I was arrested for selling drugs, the only assets that are frozen are those linked to crime. If I have legitimate funds, they're not frozen if I can prove where the money came from. Proceeds of crime are frozen, but regular income is not. You traditionally cannot freeze money or other assets unconnected to a crime. Yet here we are, people are supporting freezing assets regardless of due process or if it is actually linked to or derived from crime. Unbelievable.
And if you're using legitimate funds to infringe upon the human rights of others, the government has every right to stop you from doing that.
We take the perfectly legal crowbar out of the robber's hands when they use it to pry open home doors, so we also take the money out of the protester's bank accounts when they use it to infringe on the rights of others.
They have a right in what sense? I've never heard of a government doing that. The fact that they had to use an emergency order to do so suggests that they do not have the right.
In what sense are the truckers 'using money' to infringe on rights? The money doesn't seem critical to the movement to me. You can just as easily say they are 'using food' and mandate that they should be starved.
And yeah, I wouldn't be opposed to blocking access to food from these truckers until they moved their trucks, that makes sense to me. Their decision, at that point, would be to starve themselves by not going to where food is available to them, but otherwise it makes perfect sense to prevent access to necessities to people who are infringing on the rights of others, while they're actively infringing on those rights and can stop at any moment.
I guarantee you there’s a banker in the world somewhere willing to take your money no matter how heinous your views are. It’s the regulators that are the problem.
I think a quick read of that twitter thread up there might fill in some of the background for you. Or a quick google search.
It is a frightening degree of authoritarianism that has a substantial chance of leading to disastrous results, either in the direction of totalitarian government, or in the direction of civil war, or both. (Perhaps not immediately, and perhaps not even in Canada - but if the edict is not immediately squashed by saner heads, the precedent set will be very damaging.)
One can only hope that saner heads do prevail, on all sides, and that like many frightening crises in the past, we muddle through. Unfortunately, that is not at all guaranteed.
Saner heads are prevailing, by removing this blockade. People are being arrested, the trucks are being towed away, and the ability for the truckers to maintain this blockade is being dismantled every way possible. This is how any government should operate, albeit slower than I personally would have preferred, were I living in Ottawa.
Yes. That has to be the rule. As for instance, it being not allowed to block rail lines - how upset were you when that happened a while ago? Did you think the government should have invoked the Emergency Act and frozen the funds of anyone who has donated to an environmental group?
Protesters regularly violate various laws to various degrees, and the government should indeed shut things down when this gets too egregious. But there has to be some proportionality. The Ottawa protest has been non-violent. Reacting by freezing the bank accounts of anyone who donated to the protesters is an insane level of overreach.
Otherwise, it's not a democracy.
For...what? While there is an overlap in “protected classes” for different areas of law, they are still different for important reasons. For discrimination by government, viewpoint is necessarily protected to have a meaningful democracy.
OTOH, for the same reason, for many kinds of private discrimination, political viewpoint is an anti-protected class; that is, private discrimination is not only not prohibited, but itself an essential liberty. In the US, for the federal government, both of these are part of 1st Amendment protections of speech, press, and association.
The alternative is that you can't pay your mother rent because a third party (me) has a different political opinion to you.
The banking system is too important to be disconnected from for political reasons, it's about as close to an "off switch" you can get.
You "can't" force the phone company to carry my calls, so maybe they could cut me off and I couldn't speak to my grandma on the other side of the country any more.
Basically we have two options. For a sufficiently important system, we can either decentralize it such that there's no middleman to get in the way (physical cash is an example of this) or we can force the carriers to act neutrally.
It helps to go back to Carl Schmitt for this one who pointed out that any government that sustains itself purely on the basis of formalisms (in his view the biggest problem of liberal constitutional democracies) is going to erode because it cannot handle what he called the state of exception. When a country is in crisis, by definition some entity must be able to go 'past the law', because the law only deals with what can be anticipated and is ordinary, and government must be able to deal with existential unknowns.
In modern democracies this is martial law, state of emergency, presidential decree and so on. Covid responses overall are an example of this. Most of the measures taken by Western democracies were not 'constitutional' or orderly democratic in any genuine sense. Business loans, eviction protection, vaccination campaigns, mandates, etc. Regardless of which political side any measure appealed to, they were implemented ad hoc, legally justified at best after the fact.
So to talk about constitutional systems requires to understand that informal authority is not a threat or even bad in any sense. It's also not surprising to see this kind of criticism from someone in the 'crypto community'. Because the fetishization of contracts is what renders most of these communities ungovernable when something goes wrong.
Yes, they're like magic spells to these people. I'm thinking of the sovereign citizen types who seem to think they can repel police like demons using shouts of legalese. It's the weirdest shit.