GOP & Dem platforms: continue asset forfeiture

2011 DemoGOP forfeitures

Asset forfeiture is armed robbery by police and federal agents. This program was the primary cause of the Crash of 2007 because such looting invariably causes economic depression. These takings were the primary cause of the 1929 Crash and Banking Panics of the Great Depression, as well as the 1987 crash and ensuing Depression. Here are the 2016 asset-forfeiture planks of main political parties.

Republican Platform on Asset Forfeiture: Civil asset forfeiture was originally intended as a way to cripple organized crime through the seizure of property used in a criminal enterprise. Regrettably, it has become a tool for unscrupulous law enforcement officials, acting without due process, to profit by destroying the livelihood of innocent individuals, many of whom never recover the lawful assets taken from them. When the rights of the innocent can be so easily violated, no one’s rights are safe. We call on Congress and state legislatures to enact reforms to protect law-abiding citizens against abusive asset forfeiture tactics.

Democratic Platform on Asset Forfeiture: And we will reform the civil asset forfeiture system to protect people and remove perverse incentives for law enforcement to “police for a profit.”

Libertarian Platform on Asset Forfeiture: Eminent domain, civil asset forfeiture, governmental limits on profits, governmental production mandates, and governmental controls on prices of goods and services (including wages, rents, and interest) are abridgements of such fundamental rights.

BOTH looter parties clearly intend to keep allowing the armed robbery of individuals by police under color of law. They merely cluck their intentions to rob less brutally in the future. Neither party admits the crucial role of such confiscations and takings in precipitating major financial disasters costing trillions of dollars. Only the Libertarian Party of Principle seeks to stop police from acting in the capacity of burglars, robbers and highwaymen–and destroying the national economy in their misguided zeal.

Ayn Rand witnessed the Crash and Depression and later wrote: “But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—-men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—-then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.” Milton Friedman also witnessed the disaster and in Free To Choose noted that the Socialist platform of 1928 became law, despite their getting almost no votes.

Just today an elderly Brazilian couple in their seventies unable to speak English wrote to ask for bank statement translations, why? Because US Customs agents stole their life savings under civil asset forfeiture and they must now prove themselves innocent by deadline after deadline, for the looters allow no appeal rights. If they miss a deadline they lose their life savings. I referred them to the Institute for Justice.

By voting libertarian I am proudly multiplying the power of my vote to repeal bad laws and protect individual rights. Why not join me for a change?

Translation services, and my Brazilian blog.

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