 I found one particular tactic that Trudeau, his government and his finance minister who announced it, used was particularly nasty and particularly evil and particularly bad in terms of setting a precedent. Because of the Emergency Powers Act that I guess Trudeau declared or initiated, what they were allowed to do was to basically freeze the assets of people who participate in the protest, people who funded and provided funding for the protest. Now it's true that these actions are illegal and technically you're not allowed to fund illegal actions, but all of this freezing somebody's bank account is something really, really, really serious. This is where we all have, and we'll talk about this more in a minute, but this is where we all have our money, our savings, the money we need to buy food to put on the table, almost all of us are completely dependent on the money in the banking up being available in order for us to live, to survive, to have a life. And in order for the government to take an asset like that, any asset, but certainly an asset of importance like that, shouldn't this be some due process? Isn't incumbent upon the government to prove our guilt? Isn't there something about the presumption of innocence? Now it's always the case that emergency provisions, any law that's called emergency law is scary and authoritarian and disruptive and bad and anti-freedom everywhere and anywhere. And that's true of this in the United States and the COVID national emergency order, that was originally passed, I think, by Trump and now extended by Biden, or whether it's in Canada's emergency order, whether it's all the emergency orders passed in Hungary that gave or given almost dictatorial-like powers. Emergency orders are bad, and this is part of that emergency order, but there's something particularly evil and bad about the ability to take our money with very little recourse and certainly no immediate recourse. We see the same thing. We see the same, and I would say this, if this was just the emergency act in Canada, if this was just a one-off phenomena, you know, yeah, they declared an emergency, they did this and that's it, then okay, it's bad, it's evil, it's wrong. But this is an expression of something that is going on all over the world, going on in the United States in particular, that almost nobody talks about, that is expanding in its use, that is the confiscation of our wealth directly by freezing our bank accounts, by taking our money with no due process, with no thought about the issue of innocent before proven guilty. So it seemed like a broader topic for me, and of course, you know, you can talk about, we can talk about crypto as potentially being a solution here, but the challenge is with that as well. So think about, think about in the U.S., think about the fact that we have the police, civil forfeiture laws, the police can stop you, if they suspect that you've done something wrong, they can seize what they find in the car that they've stopped, if you have to have a suitcase full of cash, they can seize it and take it, they can take your car, they can seize it, do they need a warrant, no, do they need to prove that you've committed a crime, no, I can't think of anything more authoritarian than that, the policeman feels like you might have done something wrong and why the hell should you be traveling with a lot of cash and your car must have been used in some crime or another, and they just take it. And what's interesting in the U.S. is that part of their salary, part of their compensation of the police in certain localities is based on how much they bring in through the civil forfeiture laws. The certain counties in the U.S. that you do not want to be driving in, particularly if you have cash in the car, somebody's asking if the question's today specifically about the topic. No, you generally can ask questions about anything you want, anything you want. So the whole idea of constitutional protection, the whole idea of not being able to penalize you until you've been shown to be guilty, the whole idea of due process out the window, it doesn't exist in the U.S. and I have no idea, I don't know the legal history here, I have no idea how this has withstood the court system. I have no idea how nobody is overruled us, but that's not the only law. There was an act that was passed, I believe, in the 1970s in the United States called the RICO Act. Now the RICO Act was passed in order to go after organized crime and what would happen when they'd arrest somebody in organized crime and by the time they prosecuted, by the time they found him guilty, by the time the fine was imposed on this person, all the assets that the person would have had would have somehow disappeared and therefore he couldn't pay the fine or he couldn't pay recompense to the people he stole the money from or whatever, the money had just gone. So with the idea of fighting organized crime, Congress passed a bill called the RICO Act and the RICO Act allows the authorities to freeze your assets, to confiscate your assets once you're arrested for certain crimes. Not once you're proven guilty, not once you're, you know, you've been found guilty. No, as soon as you're arrested they freeze your bank accounts, take your stuff and then later if you're found innocent, supposedly they give it back to you. But a trial like that can take years and during that period you have no access to bank accounts and everything else. And the idea was, well, we need extraordinary measures, emergency acts to deal with extraordinary crimes, extraordinary organizations like organized crime like the Mafia and most Americans go, yeah, okay, it's an emergency, you know, people forget the extent of which organized crime was prevalent in the 1970s and how violent America was during that period. So people accepted it. It was going to be applied to Don Corleone and not to me, not to you, just to those guys and the bad guys. So when we know they're bad guys, even before we try them, we know they're guilty before we even try them, right? So we have the RICO Act that we can take their money, freeze their accounts, destroy their lives. Before we ever, ever find out that they're guilty, that wasn't the end of it. And here I'm going to tell you one of the many reasons why I despise, despise Rudy Giuliani more than probably any other politicians out there. I despise this man because in the 1980s, as the district attorney for the Southern District of New York, the district attorney responsible for Southern District of New York, which means Wall Street, yeah, more than Trump, I despise him more than Trump. And the two of them together make a wonderful couple, wonderful couple. In the early 1980s, as the district attorney for the Southern District of New York, Rudy Giuliani started using the RICO Act for the first time on non-mafia cases, on cases that involved financiers and businessmen. He famously would arrest financiers in Wall Street, put them in handcuffs, tip the press off in advance so the press was there when he made their arrest, drag them out into the street in handcuffs, then freeze their assets, freeze their accounts, use the RICO Act, claim that they had conspired and whatever the technical legal terminology is to use it. Now these trials sometimes took years. Many of them were appealed, many, many, many, many of the cases that Giuliani tried, landed up being thrown out, landed up being reversed on appeal. Maybe five years later Giuliani wasn't even there anymore, and yet for five years, people's lives have been destroyed, their reputations in fragments, in tatters, and their assets frozen, no access to money. Now this to me was unbelievable, unbelievable abuse of power, unbelievable abuse of power. Now the law is a bad law. It should have never passed Congress. It's a massive violation of rights. But then it was passed in a particular context and it was understood by everybody that this was the context and then Giuliani blew that up. He opened it up to this day. They use RICO Act to go after business leaders and businessmen and all kinds of people. Destroying people's lives, destroying their occupation, destroying their ability to make a living. And he's a good people, productive people, people who ultimately are found to be innocent. And yet it doesn't matter. Their lives are gone, finished, destroyed. Now Rudolf Giuliani did that. He put in prison, he tried and succeeded I think in destroying the lives of many people, many good people, many productive people, many successful people. And he's never paid the price for it. He never paid the price for it. I mean, he paid the price for it in his own internal hell in the fact that he, when you look at him, he looks like one of the most miserable people on planet Earth. But beyond that, he's become, after 9-11, he became a hero, a hero. So now you know a little bit more about why I despise Rudolf Giuliani. I mean, you can't, you can't live down. That's something you can't live down. You're doing the lives of productive people, doing it on purpose, not caring whether they're guilty and innocent ultimately. And doing it for one purpose and one purpose only, which was Rudolf Giuliani's motivation. One purpose and one purpose only, which was to gain political power. So you can see that this idea of freezing people's accounts, taking their money, it's not unusual. Now think about, think about the banking system. Think about banks. Think about why we have banks and what we use banks for. And what assumptions do we make about our banking relationships? You know, we, you know, before there were banks, you would have to have your money on you or bury it in the backyard or under the mattress. Usually it would be in gold coins or something like that. It would be unbelievably difficult to keep it, preserve it, protect it from thieves, protect it from loss. But money that you had in those days, in that reality, the money that you had was yours. Nobody had any business in, really in how you got it. Nobody knew how much you had. There was no paper trail. There was no way to figure out, you know, maybe some transactions were documented but many were not. And you didn't have your money in one place and it wasn't concentrated and you could have, who knows how much buried in the backyard. What you did with the money was completely private. You could have invested it. Maybe they'd be a document contract to prove that. But you could buy anything you wanted to buy. Your transactions were free. You in a sense were free to transact, not free to transact because of political freedom because there was none. You were free to transact because you had privacy. Because nobody knew what you had and nobody could follow you around and tell what you did with that money. But starting at some point, in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, people started depositing the money that they had, merchants, people who had a little bit of money with banks or the equivalent of banks, and getting pieces of paper in exchange. They would deposit the gold in the bank. They would get pieces of paper that could be exchanged back into that gold, and these people's paper became the way in which we buy and sell things. And still, pretty much everything was private. Now, there was one aspect of this that was not, and that is that all your money was being held at a bank, at an institution that had a record of, Joe has $500 here and Sam has $50. And Joe took out $50 the other day, and again, it wasn't so much in dollars, it was in gold coins and things like that, or so and so deposited this much and took out this much. So now, while we couldn't tell what you were doing with the money, what you were buying with it, what you were investing in, somebody who could get access to the records of the bank could actually tell how much money you had, could tell what was going in and out of your account, maybe they couldn't tell exactly to whom, but they could tell a lot more about your financial life than they could when all we had was gold coins. Now, speed ahead to today. Today, we have money in a bank. The money goes in, money goes out. It's not backed by gold anymore, it's just pieces of paper or really just electrons. Every one of those electrons is coded and anybody along the chain knows exactly where it came from and who it belongs to and where it's going. If somebody seizes my bank accounts, they know a lot about me. They have access to a lot of what I do. But more than that. It used to be that we would go to the bank and take out cash and then go and shop with cash and then deposit what excess cash we had in the bank after a day of business or after we sold our stuff or whatever. And so the bank was an aggregator, but there was no record of everything we did with the cash that we had. Well, today we barely have any cash. Most of our transactions are electronic, whether wire transfers, ACH, or even checks, credit cards, PayPal, Venmo, each one of which leaves an entire trail of not knowing how much money you spent, when you spent it. But where you spent it, with whom, who you paid, who paid you. There's an entire trail now of every single dollar. What you made, what you spent, where you spent it, on whom you spent it. If you transfer money and Venmo to a friend, theoretically, the government could get records of that and could identify all of them. We live in a world in which all of our lives are completely available. Completely available. To anybody who has the ability to access our bank relationships, get our credit card information, get our bank accounts, get our 401ks, our savings accounts, everything is electronic. And if the government can access all these, we have zero privacy. Now, yes, some of us still take out cash. We still have a little bit of cash in our wallets. We spend on stuff that's cash. But even that is slowly being diminished. I bet you nobody here remembers the days when there were $500 bills because the US doesn't have $500 bills anymore. Because they don't want you to transact in high-denomination bills because they don't want you to use cash because they can't track it. The European Union, the European Central Bank, I think used to have 500 euro notes and those are gone. Not because there's no demand for those notes, but because they don't want you to. They want to make sure that when you pay for something, you pay with a credit card, with a check, with something that can be tracked, that can be followed, that can be identified. Cash is anonymous. Indeed, one could argue that there is today what some people call a war on cash. The economists who advocate for doing away with cash, the politicians, the people at the Fed, who would like to completely do away with cash. The only country where you can still get a high-denomination bill is Switzerland, where you can get a 100 Swiss franc bill still to this day. It's a little over $100. I don't know who is on the $500 bill, no idea. So this so-called war on cash takes four, what is it, forms, fuel. One is to abolish high-denomination bank notes to make it very, very, very difficult for us to do significant transactions. So they limit the denomination on the bills. Second, many countries, primarily in Europe, have legal maximums for cash payments. So this I found pretty amazing. I didn't realize this existed. 12 of the 28 European Union member states have restrictions on cash payments. For example, let's see, in Italy, you're not allowed to pay cash for anything for more than 2,999.99 euros. Like it's illegal to go buy a car and give somebody $10,000 in cash. It's illegal. They don't allow it. Why? Why don't allow it? Because only crooks pay with cash because cash is a way for you to escape income taxes because the state, the state wants to monitor what you do with your money. The state wants to know how much you make. The state wants to know how much you spend. The state wants to make sure you're paying your, quote, fair share of taxes. So the state doesn't allow you to transact. Germany's tried to put a $5,000 euro limit, but it didn't go well with the public. With the public. But France and Spain have a limit. It's 1,000 euro. Supposedly in Greece, the limit is 500 euro. I'm going to have to ask Nikos if that's true. You can't pay for something more than $500 in cash. No, that's just bizarre. In the United States, of course, doesn't have a limit. You can pay whatever you want in cash, but if you pay a business more than $10,000 in cash, that business has 15 days in which to file form 8300, the IRS financial and the financial, whatever, authorities, 15 days, $10,000. If you deposit $10,000 or more in cash in the bank, the bank has to file with the authorities that you invested. If you come into the country with more than $10,000 in cash, you have to declare it and they will file. And if you don't declare it and they find it, they can confiscate it. In other words, the goal here is to prevent you from having any financial privacy, any financial privacy and cash provides for privacy. So first, there's a Bolshevik denomination bank code. Second is place the maximum legal value in cash payments. Third, require declarations of any party. Carrying a cash amount above a specific value across national borders, we just talked about that. Fourth, require banks to report to authorities any cash deposits or withdrawals in amounts above or suspiciously near a specified value. Let's say you want to deposit $20,000 cash into your account and you're worried that if you do it all at once, they'll have to report it and you don't want them to report it. So you actually deposited in three payments, 8,000, 8,000 and 4,000. That is illegal. You can go get a massive fine for that. You can get prosecuted for that. In the United States of America, our free country, your own money, not allowed to do it. Cash is discouraged, disincentivized or taxed. Now it might be silly to own cash during inflationary times and maybe inflation is the ultimate way in which government prevents us from using cash. Because with cash, you lose value because of inflation. But think about Europe, where for the longest time interest rates would be negative. Negative. You had to pay the bank to keep your money. Pay the bank to keep your money. Well in a negative zero environment, why not have cash? But they don't want you to. They want to be able to tax you. The negative interest rate is a form of tax. They want to be able to keep the banks afloat by the banks taking a fee from you. We live in a scary world. We live in a world in which our bank transactions are all accessible to the government. It doesn't take much for the government to be able to reach in. I'll give you one other example. Venmo, PayPal, Zell. You all use Venmo, PayPal, Zell. I certainly use Venmo. I love Venmo. It's easy. I move cash like that up to a certain amount. You can't do too much. PayPal. PayPal is great. Obviously, I get some of your contributions on PayPal. Zell. Pretty cool. But you know that Venmo, PayPal, and Zell have to report any transaction over $600 to the IRS means who paid and who received it. So just know that any time you're making a substantial payment on Venmo, PayPal, or Zell, the government knows about it. The government has a record of it. No, mostly we don't care. But you never know. And of course, if they have a record of it, if they have access like that to PayPal, Zell, and Venmo, they can shut it down as well. They can freeze your ability to use those services. No, we're not capitalist guys. I mean, telling you this for a long time. We're far, far from capitalist. We're far, far from free. We're far, far from free. And you saw when the Canadian government didn't like the politics of the protesters, they would have never done this to Black Lives Matter, right? Never done this to Black Lives Matter. When they didn't like the politics of the protesters, what did they do? They froze their accounts. They made it impossible for these people to live, to trade, to transact. Well, humans don't examine this data, probably. But the data is available for humans to examine. So God, if you get audited by the IRS, they will download all their data and ask you, where did you get so much money that you're moving money in this way or that way or whatever? Where did it come from? What's the source? What's the origin? Did you pay taxes on it? So sure, they don't have somebody there looking through the pieces of paper and checking everything, but they have the record and when they need the record, they will use the record. And again, think about the fact that all these people, whether you agree with the truckers or disagree with the truckers, is irrelevant here. Think about the injustice. Think about the violation of rights of these people, money basically being inaccessible to them in a world in which how do you survive without a bank account? How do you survive without a bank account? How do you survive without credit cards? What are the financial consequences of all this? Two individuals, two living, breathing individuals. So we live in a world in which, and this is not just the US and not just Europe and not just Canada, this is global. You know, Chinese certainly have access to all these things. We live in a world in which there's no financial privacy. In a world where our financial transactions are easily accessible, a world in which the legal system is amenable to great violations of rights, the confiscation of wealth, the freezing of accounts, to really painful remedies. We live in a world in which the authoritarians can flip a switch and suddenly the money we thought was ours, the money we thought was in a bank account. In its house, I can use it. I can go buy stuff. I can live off of it. It's not mine anymore. It's gone. It's disappeared. It's gone. Now, the advantage of having cash, even though it loses value every year, the advantage of having cash is it's hard for them to get access to it. But at least you have something. Imagine an authoritarian coming to power in the United States and saying, I don't like objectivists. That's your run, Brooke. The stuff he says, all right, so they shut me up. That's one thing. I can't talk anymore. Okay, that's bad, really bad. But imagine if they also say we're taking away everything in your bank accounts. What do I do? How do I live? How do I cash out? You're finished. How do you survive? Unless you have some cash, cash. Now, this is one reason if you believe the world is going to hell, at some point in our future, if you believe authoritarianism is on the rise, if you believe there's a real risk of dictatorship, or real risk of authoritarianism, or real risk of the government penalizing its political enemies, this is why not keeping all your money in the bank makes sense. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. 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