You Don't Have a Right to a Bank Account

The issue we have is allowing privatization to control currently critical aspects of modern society with limited to no oversight or public alternative. It’s not limited to banking, there are a lot of cases where private policy becomes the equivalent of law simply because they are necessary to function in daily life. In my mind, such critical services need to be called out and have public democratic policy oversight. On the one hand you become a victim of your own success: your private endeavor became so successful it became an essential part of daily life and you control most of the market.

In theory, competition between private entities allows people to “pick and choose” the set of policies they agree with, shopping around for their system of law. And in theory, competition will rise up and allow policy options for every case. In practice a lot of private businesses arrive at similar conclusions on policies that optimize their profitability and that optimization becomes what dictates policy, and then most competition duplicates or arrives at the same or similar consensus on policy. So, instead of being ruled by democratic policies, we get ruled by business profitability policies. Sometimes these are harmless, often times they’re not, so people suck it up and just accept them just like they do law in the land, even though one at least tries to be democratic.

So I definitely empathize with these crypto groups getting “debanked” on that front, even though I don’t agree with many of their business models in general.

The fundamental problem is that all of these lofty natural rights we love to champion in the US are legally framed solely in terms of negative restrictions on The Government. This was a workable approach when non-government entities were roughly comparable in power, there were many fully-competing options for businesses, and our society was not so interconnected (eg cash vs electronic transactions, and the surveillance databases read/written on every single interaction). The workability went out the window with massive scaling of centralization, especially as facilitated by the government created corporate liability shield.

Banking is one of the areas where the nominally democratic government has not only failed at addressing this broken dynamic, but has eagerly embraced it to implement authoritarian mandates that couldn't possibly pass the substantive bar set by the legal system. For example you'd have a hard time passing a law that anybody with a scary sounding name is prohibited from doing something, but at a bank that kind of arbitrary capriciousness is routine and encouraged.

[0] you might reflexively think that framing rights positively is unworkable because it creates contradictions between the same right of different parties. But what it actually does is leave the contradictions remaining front and center so they can be equitably weighed by courts. The negative framing of rights does not resolve these contradictions, but rather scuttles them in the background to be ignored until the hypocrisy grows so apparent that it boils over.

Previous (small) discussion, describing a lie of omission in the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000336

My impression is that some banking services are pretty important, and that it's in the public interest to have available to everyone.

If a regulated banking industry isn't required to provide some set of basics to all legal citizens&residents and legal businesses, then maybe the govenment has to arrange banking of last resort?

Or, if the regulated industry is the only option, where there's higher risks or costs associated with some businesses, is there a fair way to price that in, or mitigate?

For example, let's say an industry category tends to have a problem with excessive CC chargebacks that are due to dishonest customers scamming. Maybe charge the business something like the actual costs to provide all those chargebacks, but don't cut them off. And/or be less permissive towards serial-chargeback cardholders.

But in any case, let a legal business in the country accept the primary means of payment in the country. And have protections of society, like not being known as needing to keep a life-threatening amount of cash on-site at a small business.

(BTW, I personally disapprove of a lot of the kinds of businesses that I've heard complain about debanking, but as long as they're legal businesses, I think they're entitled to various basics of safe and orderly society. A little bit like, "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," though I wouldn't go quite that far on this one.)

This can affect regular engineers that receive a token allocation as part of their work. Even if you’ve given a bank account, you may be denied a mortgage.

This doesn't just mean NFT scammers. You can literally be a ZK cryptographer with a pure mathmatics degree working on a privacy program, recieving some ownership of what you produce, and boom, you can't buy a house.

More detail on Operation Chokepoint by the WSJ (as another poster points out, the NYT is omitting a lot of detail here):

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/debanking-and-the-return-of-oper...