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Comment by handoflixue | Hacker News Reader

How would you stop that from being re-invested back into the police force? If a state knows that they get $50 million from assets seized by the police, there's a very strong incentive for them to approve that $25 million budget increase the police force requested.

The article also suggests that the law is just inherently unjust: "Objects do not commit crimes: people do." Also: "Since civil forfeiture requires less evidence and offers fewer protections than criminal forfeiture, the former is more vulnerable to abuse than the latter."

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As for your first paragraph, the feedback loop will be much longer both in time (state budgets) and in distance - the risk of the proceeds ever directly benefitting the sheriff, officer or precinct is very low.

As for the second argument, I agree, it can be used to harass people.

Punitive fines, that is, those which are meant to create a change in behavior rather than compensate for a loss, should be destroyed. If an entity is fined $10 million, collect the money and "destroy" it. The money supply decreases by $10 million and everyone is ever so slightly wealthier at the expense of the offending party. Note that this is separate from fines meant to compensate a victim for their loss and suffering. It's only for the punitive function of a fine.

I'm not sure there's much difference, in theory or in practice, between destroying money and giving it to the government!

That sounds a bit anti-government but really I just meant that the money raised from fines isn't a significant part of the government's total budget so it's unlikely to have much influence on policy. Voters would pay more attention to the fines themselves than to anything that could be achieved with the money raised from them.

It might not be a significant portion of “the government’s” money, but it can be a significant portion of a local government’s money. Think of speed trap towns.

Speed trap fines should also definitely go to the state coffers, not to any one PD. Speed traps should discourage speeding in critical places, not be "financially gerrymandered" in mis-designed intersections to optimize revenue for a starved PD.

IMHO it's weird that the police even has something to do with speed traps, those should be handled by Transportation Department or some such.

Mm.

On the other hand, governments get to print money if they want to, and they have reason to. This might work, but I suspect mostly it would be a complex way of doing nothing, thanks to the literal-money-printing option.

Just on a tangent here I'm just wondering about the accounting process and mental gymnastics required to "destroy" money in the modern world with digital transfers, etc.

Can you have a process where a bank balance is decreased without transferring the money somewhere else? Do you have to buy cash and then burn it?

Maybe this is a use case for crypto. You can buy bitcoin and destroy the key.

That would do it. Although your would be incrementally pushing up the value of the remaining crypto which would be considered a bad side effect by many people.

"Buying crypto" is not a step in literally destroying money because the dollars used to buy crypto don't vanish, you just give them to the person selling you the crypto.

You would need to withdraw the dollars as cash and then set fire to the bills. That would destroy them by taking them out of circulation. If you exchange them for literally anything else you want to destroy, you're just changing ownerhsip of the money, not destroying it.

It depends if you count cryptocurrency as a currency; if you do, then it deflates that currency.

Similarly, if I have some Euros, use them to buy USD banknotes, set fire to the USD banknotes, that deflates USD but not Euros. (Would that inflate Euros instead? Or deflate both?)

Cash and burn is the way to go, you want something locally verifiable but globally hard to track

Give it to the central bank.

Destroying money is isomorphic to giving that money to the level of government controlling the central bank (with some extra busy-work). The central bank obviously has the option of simply creating an equal amount of money, and may in some rare cases be forced to do so in order to avoid deflation.

Giving that money to the level of government that controls the central bank is probably an improvement for incentive alignment over letting local governments keep it. Destruction just may not be the best way to accomplish that.

Punitive fines are fine, but they need to be scaled by income and wealth (to discourage picking only on the weak), and the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" needs to apply.

My understanding of the US problem with civil asset forfeiture is that money can be guilty until proven innocent there (and by its nature it's obviously not a fine).

This is brilliant and I'm excited to see it- especially for small fines. The way to do it is to require the punished party to bring cash, for the payment to be verified and recorded, and then publicly destroyed. This could lead to not only local governments and police no longer having horrible incentives, but also people believing that they no longer have horrible incentives- the verifiability is simple but important, like paper ballots.

Looks like a perfect opportunity for a citizen's dividend. Anything that is taken is put into a pot. After a certain time all of that is given back equal to all citizens.

Which is a terrible idea if you consider it for more but a moment. Makes it very easy to abuse a minority population, because now not only does the majority just get to abuse them, they get to profit off it too. Sure, the minority group might get back some of what was taken, but it won't even be close to equitable compensation for what was actually taken.

What happens when they discover the forfeited assets are timeshare condos?

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