[jariel]

Quote:

In his book "Why the West Rules -- for Now," historian Ian Morris draws a distinction between two ways of running a country. He calls these “high-end” and “low-end” strategies. High-end states have efficient, centralized bureaucracies and a credible legal apparatus, while low-end states rely on local authorities to do things like collecting taxes and providing security. According to Morris, high-end states are more effective at creating rich, powerful, technologically advanced civilizations, but they are also more expensive -- when resources are strained, countries sometimes revert to the cheaper, low-end solutions. Often, transitions from high-end to low-end strategies follow wars, famines and other disasters that reduce the state’s ability to finance its activities directly.

Modern rich nations, with their extensive court systems, bureaucracies, militaries and infrastructure, look distinctly high-end compared with the feudal lands of past centuries. But in the U.S., I see some troubling signs of a shift toward low-end institutions. Bounty hunting was a recent example (now happily going out of style). Another example is the use of private individuals or businesses to collect taxes, a practice known as tax farming. A third has been the extensive use of mercenaries in lieu of U.S. military personnel in Iraq and elsewhere. Practices such as these can save money for the government, but they encourage abuses by reducing oversight.

I’ve recently been reading about an even more worrying example of low-end statecraft: Stop-and-seize. This term refers to a practice, increasingly common since the turn of the century, of police confiscating people’s property without making an arrest or obtaining a warrant. That may not sound legal, but it is! The police simply pull you over and take your money.

A Washington Post investigative report from a year ago explains:

[A]n aggressive brand of policing [is spreading] that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes...Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.

Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms…

A thriving subculture of road officers…now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.

“All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym…Hain’s book calls for “turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods.”

This is exactly the process of devolution that Morris describes. With government unable to pay police as much as they need or would like, police are confiscating their revenue directly from the populace.

The threat to individual liberty from stop-and-seize is painfully clear. Without requirements for an arrest or for a warrant, the power to confiscate cash is a clear diminution of property rights. Effectively, the police have been given official sanction to commit literal highway robbery without the threat of punishment. People whose property was seized must pay a lot of money and spend a long time in court for even the chance of getting it back, and police who seize money with no good reason don't, apparently, suffer any threat of discipline.

But stop-and-seize also presents a danger to public trust. When the cops go around taking money from innocent people to fund their own departments and salaries, it understandably decreases trust in the government and the legal system. That is something we can ill-afford at the present time, with trust in the police already at a low ebb over a series of videos of police killings. If they don’t trust the government, people will be less likely to report criminals, and possibly less likely to follow the law themselves.

Even more fundamentally, though, stop-and-seize is part of a worrying trend of less government accountability. The lack of oversight virtually ensures that the quality of government services will decline. This has been painfully apparent in abuses by bounty hunters, mercenaries and private prisons. But if the police are transformed into independent, self-funding armed gangs, the quality of policing -- and thus the effectiveness of all our legal institutions -- is sure to decline.

If you believe -- as many economists do -- that the rule of law is a key determinant of a nation’s prosperity, then you should be worried about this. Stop-and-seize should be stopped.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/20...ding-gangs

[The Beast1]

The easiest solution to all of this is to legislate that all ill gotten gains from police busts get sent to funds for schools and hospitals. The police should not be able to bolster their budgets and especially not add it to their pensions!

[Dr. Howard]

(11-19-2015 12:49 PM)jariel Wrote:  

Quote:

In his book "Why the West Rules -- for Now," historian Ian Morris draws a distinction between two ways of running a country. He calls these “high-end” and “low-end” strategies. High-end states have efficient, centralized bureaucracies and a credible legal apparatus, while low-end states rely on local authorities to do things like collecting taxes and providing security. According to Morris, high-end states are more effective at creating rich, powerful, technologically advanced civilizations, but they are also more expensive -- when resources are strained, countries sometimes revert to the cheaper, low-end solutions. Often, transitions from high-end to low-end strategies follow wars, famines and other disasters that reduce the state’s ability to finance its activities directly.

Modern rich nations, with their extensive court systems, bureaucracies, militaries and infrastructure, look distinctly high-end compared with the feudal lands of past centuries. But in the U.S., I see some troubling signs of a shift toward low-end institutions. Bounty hunting was a recent example (now happily going out of style). Another example is the use of private individuals or businesses to collect taxes, a practice known as tax farming. A third has been the extensive use of mercenaries in lieu of U.S. military personnel in Iraq and elsewhere. Practices such as these can save money for the government, but they encourage abuses by reducing oversight.

I’ve recently been reading about an even more worrying example of low-end statecraft: Stop-and-seize. This term refers to a practice, increasingly common since the turn of the century, of police confiscating people’s property without making an arrest or obtaining a warrant. That may not sound legal, but it is! The police simply pull you over and take your money.

A Washington Post investigative report from a year ago explains:

[A]n aggressive brand of policing [is spreading] that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes...Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.

Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms…

A thriving subculture of road officers…now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.

“All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym…Hain’s book calls for “turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods.”

This is exactly the process of devolution that Morris describes. With government unable to pay police as much as they need or would like, police are confiscating their revenue directly from the populace.

The threat to individual liberty from stop-and-seize is painfully clear. Without requirements for an arrest or for a warrant, the power to confiscate cash is a clear diminution of property rights. Effectively, the police have been given official sanction to commit literal highway robbery without the threat of punishment. People whose property was seized must pay a lot of money and spend a long time in court for even the chance of getting it back, and police who seize money with no good reason don't, apparently, suffer any threat of discipline.

But stop-and-seize also presents a danger to public trust. When the cops go around taking money from innocent people to fund their own departments and salaries, it understandably decreases trust in the government and the legal system. That is something we can ill-afford at the present time, with trust in the police already at a low ebb over a series of videos of police killings. If they don’t trust the government, people will be less likely to report criminals, and possibly less likely to follow the law themselves.

Even more fundamentally, though, stop-and-seize is part of a worrying trend of less government accountability. The lack of oversight virtually ensures that the quality of government services will decline. This has been painfully apparent in abuses by bounty hunters, mercenaries and private prisons. But if the police are transformed into independent, self-funding armed gangs, the quality of policing -- and thus the effectiveness of all our legal institutions -- is sure to decline.

If you believe -- as many economists do -- that the rule of law is a key determinant of a nation’s prosperity, then you should be worried about this. Stop-and-seize should be stopped.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/20...ding-gangs

Except YOU are the Sheriff not Robin Hood in this story you dumb deputy. Time to break out the disney classics again deputy Hain

[262]

Quite timely since I just finished watching the NWA movie.

Makes me think:

Feminism/Socialism? First affected the black community (there's a RoK article about this).

Corrupt police? Looks like the same - they got it first, and now it's spreading.

Unrelated to the NWA movie ... So the US will soon be like Ukraine - corrupt - but minus the feminine women? lol

[BortimusPrime]

Another big threat are for-profit prisons. It's really easy to sell people on the idea that prisoners should be forced to work to pay for the cost of housing them, but the slippery slope is that demand for cheap labor causes businesses to bribe judges to start sentencing people to prison for trivial crimes in order to provide a supply of workers that are easily exploited owing to lack of public sympathy.

As it stands even without the slave labor there already seems to be a problem with privately-owned prisons paying off judges to do this simply because the prisons are operating as head shops where they get a bigger govt check the more people they cram in.

[eljeffster]

(11-19-2015 05:56 PM)BortimusPrime Wrote:  

Another big threat are for-profit prisons. It's really easy to sell people on the idea that prisoners should be forced to work to pay for the cost of housing them, but the slippery slope is that demand for cheap labor causes businesses to bribe judges to start sentencing people to prison for trivial crimes in order to provide a supply of workers that are easily exploited owing to lack of public sympathy.

As it stands even without the slave labor there already seems to be a problem with privately-owned prisons paying off judges to do this simply because the prisons are operating as head shops where they get a bigger govt check the more people they cram in.

The for profit system gets worse:

http://www.njjn.org/uploads/digital-libr...,-9.13.pdf

That link is to a PDF re: "lockup quotas"

Private Prisons will contract with state government with a mandatory quota which means that the state has to provide x amount of prisoners under the contract. If crime drops and prisons still need to be filled . . .

[Saweeep]

It could be worse:

I failed a "breathalyser" here in Thailand a couple of weeks ago. I put it in brackets because I had had one 330ml beer two hours before. Funny how only Westerners were being stopped at the checkpoint.

Cost me 6.000 Baht in bribes or apparently I was going to jail.

I dread to think how many Westerners were extorted that day and the profits generated by the police.

Last time I was here I got fined for not wearing a seatbelt despite wearing a seatbelt.

If that Breathalyser wasn't set up to the lowest threshold possible, well well below the legal limit, I'll eat it.

[Fortis]

"When white america has a cold, black America has the flu."

[Exquirenoir]

I guess Kanye West was on to something with his "New slaves " song.


-See they'll confuse us with some bullshit like the New World Order
Meanwhile the DEA
Teamed up with the CCA
They tryna lock niggas up
They tryna make new slaves
See that's that private owned prison
Get your piece today
They Probably all in the Hamptons
Braggin' 'bout their maid

I forget what show I was watching where to the topic was how there so many African Americans in prison because of the way charges were given for Crack vs Cocaine.

The system knew that Crack was predominantly a black thing, so they would charge more time for a couple of rocks vs a couple of bricks.

Just so they can fill the prisons up faster.

[GlobalMan]

(11-20-2015 01:05 AM)CrashBangWallop Wrote:  

It could be worse:

I failed a "breathalyser" here in Thailand a couple of weeks ago. I put it in brackets because I had had one 330ml beer two hours before. Funny how only Westerners were being stopped at the checkpoint.

Cost me 6.000 Baht in bribes or apparently I was going to jail.

I dread to think how many Westerners were extorted that day and the profits generated by the police.

Last time I was here I got fined for not wearing a seatbelt despite wearing a seatbelt.

If that Breathalyser wasn't set up to the lowest threshold possible, well well below the legal limit, I'll eat it.

Most people probably don't want to risk it, but honestly sometimes the best thing to do in those situations is to call their bluff. I've done it there and elsewhere. These guys don't want to deal with you if you make yourself a hassle to deal with. It may not seem like it initially, but after some back and forth and insisting on going to the police station they will wave you on. They know they have nothing, and they don't want to waste the time.

Would I do this everywhere? No, it depends on the country and circumstance. But in Thailand you're not likely to be fucked over too hard by the cops if you insist on doing things the right way. They will back down. They just want the easy Baht.

For me, I'm not throwing away $150 unless i'm being threatened by 'cops' in rural Mexico or somewhere there is a real danger and winding up in a ditch or behind bars.

[Duke Castile]

"They know they have nothing".

Where exactly did you insist on going to the police station and under what exact circumstances?

[GlobalMan]

(11-20-2015 04:53 AM)Fisto Wrote:  

"They know they have nothing".

Where exactly did you insist on going to the police station and under what exact circumstances?

Thailand, Chile and Colombia. All during roadblocks/traffic stops.

[Duke Castile]

You're saying they threatened to take you to jail and in every case you insisted on going but they waved you on through?

[GlobalMan]

(11-20-2015 05:04 AM)Fisto Wrote:  

You're saying they threatened to take you to jail and in every case you insisted on going but they waved you on through?

In all cases they wanted fines on the spot for made up violations, otherwise "we'll take your car" (Chile x2), "you'll go to jail" (Thailand) (Colombia x2).

In one of the instances in Colombia I got the 'fine' down to 40k pesos (about $15), the other (2nd) time I said ok let's go to the police station, they offered to lower the fine, I kept repeating lets go to the police station, eventually the waved me on. This was outside Bogota on the way to La Mesa.

Similar in Thailand- threatened fine for non-existent violation or go to jail, refused, asked for them to explain the violation and I pointed out how they are incorrect, argue, they relent.

Chile- they are perhaps the worst of the three regarding driving 'violations' and roadblocks. I'm not even sure they are seeking bribes, they really do believe you are committing some kind of violation. Even if you have it all, they always say you're missing something. Here the best strategy was playing dumb gringo.

This is a very common if you're a gringo (or farang in Thailand) driving in these countries. They are looking for the easy and uninformed target and relying on your fear. Sometimes playing dumb works best, other times it's best directly telling them there is no violation and you want to go to the police station to sort it out. They don't want to do that- they want your money to pocket on the side of the road. The officers on the street gain nothing from taking you to jail, especially if it's BS, and that's all they're interested in- something to gain.

[262]

Add "yes means yes" to the for-profit prison system, and dare I say it, you have even more means for de facto male slavery (unless you're lucky enough to be born elite or hawt).

It really is as CH said:

"The goal of feminism is to maximally enable female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality."

Edit: I can see the feminist wet dream now. All beta males work in labor camps. Females share the few alphas available and never have to interact with betas. Alphas, females, and their bastard alpha offspring are supported by the production from the beta male labor camps.

Wait, this already describes the poor in the West. It's just spreading "up."

[Dr. Howard]

(11-20-2015 05:40 AM)262 Wrote:  

Add "yes means yes" to the for-profit prison system, and dare I say it, you have even more means for de facto male slavery (unless you're lucky enough to be born elite or hawt).

It really is as CH said:

"The goal of feminism is to maximally enable female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality."

Edit: I can see the feminist wet dream now. All beta males work in labor camps. Females share the few alphas available and never have to interact with betas. Alphas, females, and their bastard alpha offspring are supported by the production from the beta male labor camps.

Wait, this already describes the poor in the West. It's just spreading "up."

That would make for a good dystopian movie. Like some sort of reverse gladiators where slaves have the chance at freedom or at least fame by being some sort of sex gladiators, starting out on the 1 and 2 scale with mutants and fatties and battling their way up....and the thumbs up or down is determined by how many tinder swipes the gladiator gets.

Thats it, I'm off to write the next great women's novel. It will fit somewhere between 50 shades of grey and twilight, but in the future.

[Deepdiver]

Desert Snow and Black Asphalt:

Note that 25% bounty on seized cash adds up quickly... Most local police forces keep 100% for discretionary budget use...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investi...h/?hpid=z1

Black Asphalt also has served as a social hub for a new brand of highway interdictors, a group that one Desert Snow official has called “a brotherhood.” Among other things, the site hosts an annual competition to honor police who seize the most contraband and cash on the highways. As part of the contest, Desert Snow encouraged state and local patrol officers to post seizure data along with photos of themselves with stacks of currency and drugs. Some of the photos appear in a rousing hard-rock video that the Guthrie, Okla.-based Desert Snow uses to promote its training courses.

Annual winners receive Desert Snow’s top honorific: Royal Knight. The next Royal Knight will be named at a national conference hosted in Virginia Beach next year in collaboration with Virginia State Police.

In just one five-year stretch, Desert Snow-trained officers reported taking $427 million during highway encounters, according to company officials. A Post analysis found the training has helped fuel a rise in cash seizures in the Justice Department’s main asset forfeiture program.

In January last year, David hired himself and his top trainers out as a roving private interdiction unit for the district attorney’s office in rural Caddo County, Okla. Working with local police, Desert Snow contract employees took in more than $1 million over six months from drivers on the state’s highways, including Interstate 40 west of Oklahoma City. Under its contract, the firm was allowed to keep 25 percent of the cash.

[262]

Another way to fund your way out of the West:

1) Become a police officer
2) Abuse stop-and-seize
3) ???
4) Profit!!!