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Comment by Digit-Al | Hacker News Reader

As an Englishman, I have a couple of questions for you Americans on here.

1) Does anyone know who came up with these "civil asset forfeitures"? (Personally, they seem most un-civil to me.)

2) Can any of you defend America as "the land of the free" when more of the population are in prison than in almost any other country in the word and the police not only have the power to strip you of your property and assets without even needing a solid reason, but can shoot you dead and barely get a slap on the wrist?

Not having a go at America or Americans, but it seems to me that those who truly believe it to be a land of the free are deluding themselves.

[edit: damn keyboard]

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1) The history in the U.S., it is probably fair to say, is primarily tied up in various prohibition laws, most recently drug prohibition. Though some of the precedent apparently can be traced back to British Maritime Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...)

2) Not if they're intellectually honest about it. If one reads the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in context and in their spirit, it's hard to countenance that civil forfeiture is at all consistent with our founding principles. In fact, the practice is highly contrary to those principles.

(This is not to say that those principles have ever actually been properly applied consistently since day one of the Republic. Still, a damn good effort to do so ought be made.)

can you recommend a book for someone who wants to understand more about the US - IE what the declaration of independence and constitution are, and how the US got to where it is now? covering history and politics and anything else useful to really grok these types of discussions?

I really can't. That's not to say that they don't exist, but I'm not familiar with any single book that I know I could say, "look here," and feel good about it. My own knowledge has accumulated across many different sources over many years. I am also a bit distrustful of more modern sources that want to project the nation's founding one way or another for contemporary purposes. Any such book must look at British/Colonial relations, the philosophical movements afoot in Europe and elsewhere which we call the Enlightenment, U.S. history in the 18th and 19th centuries (internal expansion and gradually working for greater international presence) and then good world histories for the 20th century. Tall order for one book :-).

For the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, it might just be easier (to start) by just reading them directly. I have a small (12.5cm x 9cm) book that contains both documents and is only 58 pages long at that size. Read them in that order as the Declaration lays out the moral statement for why a break from the British Empire was seen as necessary by the (then) British colonists and the Constitution was the legal reflection of those ideas... reading the Federalist Papers is great for getting in the mind of the Constitution's authors and supporters.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful. Just a few weeks ago I watch a lecture that talked about Magna Carta and include discussion on its influence on the U.S. revolutionaries that founded the country. Just that one aspect was something that I didn't really see in many of the histories I've seen.

I appreciate your response! knowing that there's definitely no one single unbiased good book/source is actually a very useful thing to keep in mind - I'm currently reading "a peoples history of the united states" and pretty quickly realized that whilst it contains a lot of information, it's (necessarily?) written in a very particular tone.

As a recent transplant to the US I actually like the idea of having my own copy of the declaration and constitution, for both the actual information and kind of symbolic novelty of being here.

Thanks!

In practice, America isn't universally the land of the free and never has been. However, it has founding principles that many people believe in which do advocate widespread freedoms. These principles have not been and still are not applied properly.

I'm not going to try to defend civil asset forfeiture (it's an abhorrent practice), but I still do think America is marginally more free than most places for a few reasons:

- I don't think the number of people in prison is the best measure of whether a country is free or not. By that logic, a backwater regime which simply dealt with undesirables via extrajudicial shootings would be more "free."

- Likewise, the notion that police can "shoot you dead and barely get a slap on the wrist" is quite hyperbolic. Yes, there are plenty of cases of police brutality and we need a better system for prosecuting police murders (ideally an independent prosecutorial office which only prosecuted police). But I'm no more afraid of getting shot by the police than I am of dying in any other unlikely way (terrorist attack, random serial killer, etc.).

- We do still have some rights which are freer than anywhere else. Free speech, for example, enjoys much better protection in the US. Trying to prosecute someone for insulting a foreign leader would get laughed out of court here, but apparently it's a crime in Germany. Our secret police are marginally less brazen than GCHQ. The prospect of a national firewall/blacklist is a lot more distant here.

"But I'm no more afraid of getting shot by the police than I am of dying in any other unlikely way (terrorist attack, random serial killer, etc.)."

You may be unafraid, but there is an order of magnitude difference between your examples. Serial killers murder about 150 people per year, terrorist attacks killed 19 in 2015. Cops killed 1146 people.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0...

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/...

I didn't mean to say that they are equally likely. Rather, they're all so unlikely that it's really not worth worrying about them.

1. Most recently, Ronald Reagan's take on the War on Drugs.

2. It's the land of the free if you're not one of the 'bad' minorities. That same moniker was used when it enslaved millions of people. The fact that they are now sitting in prison, instead of being forced to pick cotton is tangential.

> Most recently, Ronald Reagan's take on the War on Drugs.

The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 - which started all of this - was introduced by a Democrat and passed through a majority Democratic House.

All sides are guilty of opening this genie's bottle.

1) Civil asset forfeiture was created to seize the assets of drug cartels where the believed owner of the property in possession is in another country and has a modest army preventing extradition to stand trial. However, any government entity seeks to expand it's revenue first and foremost and this is a tremendous way to do that and it's being(predictably) abused. 2) Every country has a narrative about itself that isn't 100% correct, consistent or logical. That isn't how people work. Hopefully this ideal will help the revocation of civil asset forfeiture soon. The trend seems to be going that way.

> Civil asset forfeiture was created to seize the assets of drug cartels where the believed owner of the property in possession is in another country and has a modest army preventing extradition to stand trial.

No, it wasn't. In the early US (which imported the legal concept from British maritime law) it was first used as a means to assure collection of customs duties. It expanded during prohibition, but even then was deployed primarily against domestic bootleggers, not kingpins residing in a foreign country with protection against extradition.

America is a racist nation, if you target Black and Brown people much of this nation has no problem with constant violations of basic rights .

It's never been "a land of the free." The original constitution didn't even include the bill of rights because it can't be easily reconciled with slavery.

EDIT: I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. If you think it is wrong at least state why it is wrong.

" The original constitution didn't even include the bill of rights..."

I've heard this before and it's complete bullshit. The constitution as originally ratified by all the colonies included the bill of rights. Sure, there were many drafts and prior versions that didn't include it, but it has been there since its release. If you use that logic, the original was a blank sheet of paper and didn't include anything.

> > "" The original constitution didn't even include the bill of rights..."

> I've heard this before and it's complete bullshit.

Well, except for the part where its completely true.

> The constitution as originally ratified by all the colonies included the bill of rights.

No, it didn't. The Constitution, without amendments, was ratified in 1788. The 12-amendment Bill of Rights was passed by Congress and submitted to the States for ratification in 1789. Of those 12 amendments, the last 10 were ratified in 1791 and became Amendments 1-10 to the Constitution (what is popularly now known as the "Bill of Rights"), while the second was ratified in 1992 and became Amendment 27, and the first is, technically, still pending and open for ratification.

> The original constitution didn't even include the bill of rights because it can't be easily reconciled with slavery.

The original Constitution expressly recognized and protected slavery, true, and did not include the bill of rights, but not because it couldn't be reconciled with slavery, but because the bill of rights was crafted to address concerns raised by critics of the original Constitution; the Bill of Rights (well, the 10 amendments popularly called that now -- the package proposed had 12, one of which still isn't ratified, and one of which took a little over 200 years to be ratified) was ratified within a few years of the original Constitution, and had no problem being reconciled with slavery, which was still around until being abolished by the 13th Amendment after the Civil War.

Ridiculous. The reason the Bill of Rights was not included in the constitution proper is that the enumerated powers clause states that the federal government is assumed to have no authority other than that explicitly granted to it. The Federalists were concerned that as soon as you started listing rights that were specifically protected, people would get the idea that those were the ONLY rights protected, which was contrary to the principle on which the nation was founded.

I wish I could upvote you more than once. This is an important factor that during the foundation of our country that seems to be playing out in real time in our modern times, and it's a discussion that needs to be had.

The government needs to be reminded the people are what give it any legitimacy in the first place, and such blatant unconstitutionality needs to be prosecuted and denounced loudly and publicly.

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