Hacker News Reader

Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

Surprised to find this on the front page of HN.

Note that the current law already forbids cash transactions higher than 11,000 NIS and that an exception is carved out for automobile purchases. This law is tightening screws that already exist, not implementing new screws.

View on HN

Why is an insidious erosion of rights and liberties better than a sudden one, and why does that (if that's why, it's unclear) make it surprising to find on the front page?

Culturally, Israelis only value privacy in very narrow contexts that are carved out and afforded protection in law (reputational and medical privacy). This is a country where there are security guards who open your bags before you can enter public places like government offices, malls, and public transit terminals, and airport security at Ben Gurion is world-famous for its invasiveness.

Israelis accept this because Ben Franklin's quote about liberty and security falls on deaf ears here. To Israelis, security is a pre-requisite for liberty, not the other way around, and there is wide public support for measures that would be completely DOA in the US, like government identity registries (that now include facial scans and fingerprint databases, with fingerprinting admittedly optional but fingerprinting extends the validity period of issued identification) and extremely strict gun control.

Financial security is pretty much the same, for example, most of the Israeli drug trade links back to terrorist organizations and as such a "war on cash" is seen by many as fighting against terrorists as well.

> Ben Franklin's quote about liberty and security

Although the rest of your point stands, this part is a common misconception. The exact context of the quote was about a taxation dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the Penn family, and didn't actually have much to do with modern day liberty or security[0].

[0] https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...

Right. These would be DOA in America because our distrust of centralized power largely outweighs our fear of invasion or terrorism. The biggest gains of the police state in the US have all been in the wake of wars or terror attacks (or in the name of pseudo-"wars" like the war on drugs), And this is perfectly predictable. But even given the long history of Israel's status as a besieged military state on the constant defensive, is this really the direction you want to see it go in the future? Because it seems to me that this is a path toward Chinese-style totalitarianism, where once someone flips a switch and democracy fails there would be no going back. Are you that certain that these kinds of measures should be scaled up and up?

> These would be DOA in America because our distrust of centralized power largely outweighs our fear of invasion or terrorism.

Federal law requires a person to report cash transactions of more than $10,000 by filing IRS Form 8300PDF, Report of Cash Payments Over $10,000 Received in a Trade or Business. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/cash-payment-report-helps-gover...

See also https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/CTRPamphle... Federal law requires financial institutions to report currency (cash or coin) transactions over $10,000 conducted by, or on behalf of, one person, as well as multiple currency transactions that aggregate to be over $10,000 in a single day

And finally remember civil forfeiture implies carrying "large" amounts of cash risks police seizing the cash with very limited recourse.

So no, not DOA in the US, rather already existing in the US but in a more sly format

I'd argue there's a big difference between a law which requires reporting a transaction and one which criminalizes it.

I have no problem reporting large cash transactions. I do have a problem keeping all my money in electronic accounts that can be vaporized by government fiat, hacking, bank insolvency, clerical error, EMP, etc.

> These would be DOA in America because our distrust of centralized power largely outweighs our fear of invasion or terrorism

What about organized crime? You have one of the, if not the worst crime rates in the developed world.

Where do you get your data?

According to [1] Israel's crime rate is 105/135 (higher is worse). It's better than Norway and worse than China. USA, by comparison, is 56, which is worse than Ghana, Egypt and Lebanon (but better than Sweden and Iraq).

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/crime-rat...

This looks like a random SEO spamblog-equivalent site. It sources another site, numbeo, that also is more or less unidentified and says it polls random site visitors?

Most of the crime that affects Americans is not really organized though.

Franklin’s quote was about liberty (of the legislature) to tax so it is even more apposite here

I hadn't heard of this before today, and I think the same is probably true for many other people, so I found it interesting and notable.

In other news, they also plan to raise minimum wage to NIS 6000 by 2025.

This effectively mandates electronic banking for all full time salaried workers by 2025.

I'm sure that I am missing something obvious here, but why are car purchases exempt from the threshold reduction? Dealers/dealerships must come under an awful lot of regulatory scrutiny - or pressure from elements keen to keep transactions private. Or maybe the exception applies to only person-to-person sales, and not buinesses.

Basically a political carve-out for the only reason "most" people would need to handle such a large amount of cash.

Maybe it is beneficial for the knowledge of those who didn't know about the original screws in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com