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Comment by jcbrand | Hacker News Reader

But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away.

I'm not, I'm pointing out the rhetorical techniques being used to delegitimize people who try to create privacy tools.

You mean to say that we live in a democracy. We elect our representatives, and they pick who runs these institutions.

It's a pernicious myth that there is some meaningful democratic oversight over monetary policy. Central banks are privately owned and/or structured in such a way as to not be beholden to political pressure (for the somewhat justifiable reason that politicians are even worse at managing monetary policy).

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> It's a pernicious myth that there is some meaningful democratic oversight over monetary policy

Latinate words are not a useful cover when you're lying. All Western central banks are effectively a branch of government and are directly responsible to Congress/euparl/$local_variant, and are run by a bunch of politicians (the chair of the Fed is Powell and the president of the ECB is Lagarde, ffs).

The notion that they aren't beholden to the popular will is just ridicolous.

The second paragraph on Wikipedia:

Central banks in most developed nations are institutionally independent from political interference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank

You used 'privately owned' to indicate it being shady.

The paper linked in the Wikipedia citation for that line has the following in its abstract:

"The governance of central banks has two dimensions: corporate governance and public governance. Public governance is an institutional framework whereby the general public governs a central bank by and through the legislative and executive bodies in a country (...)".

"Independence of the central bank" means independence from direct intrusion by the executive branch, in the same sense the judiciary is independent from political interference.

So, generally, are courts, police and civil servants.

That doesn’t mean that those are not government institutions.

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