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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

Freedom is usually the opposite of cumbersome and annoying. And current payment tech does not rob us of freedom.

I can wire money to virtually anyone in the EU at no cost. I can pay any merchant in the world with a credit card, in any currency, with minimal spread. It's both convenient and greatly expands my options for engaging in commerce.

Cashless system operated by regulated banks certainly comes with a risk of being used as a tool of repression (like it was in Canada during the truckers protests) but as of now it's freeing (as in speech).

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You will find out how easily you can wire money to someone in the EU if you decide to hold political opinions that are not in line with the ruling elite.

The truckers in Canada for sure found out how "free" the digits of their bank accounts were.

Russian oligarchs for sure found it out in 2022.

Blocking terrorist financing is nothing new.

If you give the government the power to block financing to anyone they declare a terrorist then they'll just declare anyone who opposes them to be terrorists.

Empirical evidence suggests otherwise, at least in liberal democracies.

survirorship bias

Empirical evidence can suggest anything you want it to if you choose to ignore empirical evidence that's inconvenient to you.

The Canadian trucker protesters were not "terrorists" by any stretch of imagination, but sure let's assume otherwise because it helps us sleep better at night, right?

Pretty sure building a bomb on Parliament Hill makes you a terrorist group. Nevermind all the other dangerous stuff that was going on.

> if you decide to hold political opinions that are not in line with the ruling elite.

Then don't.

It's much easier to adhere to the status quo.

This is the milquetoast approach of most Canadians - a major factor in why Canada, in it's current state, is rather cooked.

The truckers did had their bank accounts frozen due to their actions, not due to their political opinions.

Their actions were Charter-protected freedom of expression and the freeze was a Charter-breaching unreasonable seizure.

>Justice Mosley ruled that “the decision to issue the Proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration” [0]

[0] https://www.aclrc.com/blog/2024/2/1/federal-court-rules-that...

I wasn't commenting on the legality of the asset freeze. I was responding to OP's attributing it to "if you decide to hold political opinions that are not in line with the ruling elite." As far as I'm aware, they did not survey the population and then take action against people with the wrong opinions.

A distinction without a difference. The ruling elite doesn't have to survey the population. They sandbagged the population into alignment with their own opinions, then strong-armed holdouts and specifically targeted them along every possible vector (social, legal, economic, etc.) for their adherence to wrong beliefs. I shudder at how much worse this could get in a fully cashless society.

So, everyone in the population of Canada who disagreed with the ruling elite's opinions was personally "strong-armed" and "targeted"? Or only a subset of them? If it was just a subset, could there have been anything that distinguished much of that subset apart from the rest of the people who weren't "targeted?" Maybe some event they took part in or helped?

Yes, everyone in all of Canada who disagreed with the ruling elite's opinions at the time saw themselves strong-armed and targeted by both legislation and vitriol from public officials. The greater the perceived threat to destabilizing belief in the elite opinion from any subset, the more severe the measures taken - as we saw, including unreasonable wartime actions to force compliance.

Well, since I don't live in Canada, I'm just going to have to hit the eject button and trust you that every single person in the country holding a particular political belief, likely tens of millions, were personally and directly targeted by the government with enforcement action, as ridiculous as that sounds.

In any country people are personally and directly affected by subjugation measures directed at their ingroup, I don't think that's particularly controversial.

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