Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

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In general, civil forfeiture abuse is rampant and blooming in the US, especially given the financial incentive to perpetrate it and the lack of proper safeguards. That way of thinking you describe is already open and that's exactly what happens if the police suspects you are not going to give them a good fight (i.e. is poor or alien or live far away or something of that nature) and/or the money or the property would be worth less to you than the cost of the fight, and they have chance to keep the money (in some jurisdictions, they do not). This is exactly the way the law is interpreted right now. Just google the numerous cases of civil forfeiture abuse and despair.

However, in the case of SR they actually may have a pretty good case that those are money intended to buy drugs, etc. - it's not like SR ever hidden what they're selling and the buyers hid what they are buying, and looks like the law enforcement has these records. So since under the current law drug trade is a crime, and they would have absolutely no trouble proving the money is actually the drug money, in this case it is hard to classify this as abuse, at least without venturing into the whole topic of drug legalization and so on, which is beyond the point.

Honestly, I think we should just burn (the value of) the assets seized (after trial, appeal, &c, of course).

Yes, it would mean stepping up and funding things currently funded with proceeds from seizures, but it would remove significant incentive to overreach.

Destroying resources just because criminal touched them seems pointless. Removing financial incentive for abuse seems reasonable, but that does not mean resources should be destroyed. They can be routed to the uses which have no connection with law enforcement and do not provide abuse initiative. US government has so many needs one can surely find one.

In case it wasn't clear, I don't mean physical destruction of real things. I mean auctioning the physical, and then destroying the received money electronically.

With a fiat currency, it's not actually destroying anything. I'd rather no one feel it as part of their bottom line, or there will be pressure. Certainly, moving it far from law enforcement would be an improvement, but I think destruction is better.

But why it is better if the same resource could be used to make something good - e.g. build a hospital for the poor or feed some starving people, etc.?

Because I don't want anyone looking at a spreadsheet and saying, "Oh shoot, we could actually meet our targets if only the police would seize another $10 million..."

Putting that person further away from the police probably improves things, as I said, but better that we just build such hospitals and fund such social programs as we actually need, and not rely on people doing bad things (either the people whose stuff is being confiscated, or the police confiscating property of innocents) to make it happen.

Note again that at this scale cash isn't really a resource - it's a claim on resources. Destroying it doesn't destroy those resources, it releases the claim which winds up sort of distributed over other dollars.

because incentives distort actions. if what is seized is destroyed of value, then there is no longer any motivation to view seized property as some sort of fund raising drive.

That's why separation of incentives from actions is important. If the police has no control over the money and can not benefit from it, they do not have incentive for abuse. The hospital which will get the money may have, but they won't have the means.

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