We own you.

At the same time, Treasury Secretary Yellen insists the IRS needs to step up, inspecting all transactions over $600: wouldn’t a central-bank digital currency make it easier, he asked, recognizing a Trojan horse when he sees one? Yellen also admitted in an interview that the $600 mark is not where tax evasion is happening. That’s in the Pandora Papers which, just as I expected, are fading from public view as rapidly as all the other piles of steaming elite malfeasance elephant-dung in the room.^[1]

$600 might cover my weekly alcohol payment but, maybe it's just me, it seems like the transaction is a private thing. The Fourth Amendment provides that

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

And last I heard that hadn't been repealed. Pinky swear.

To me, my bank transactions seem as much a part of my "papers and effects" as anything in my file cabinet or under the mattress but the lawyers who work for the IRS and the Congress seem to think that legislation trumps the clear provisions of the Constitution. I'm fine with the "no expectation of privacy" approach to interpretation of the Fourth Amendment but I bristle at the thought that a letter I seal in an envelope and deposit in the mail requires the government to show probable cause before it can get a search warrant to open that envelope yet an email I send has no such protection because I have no expectation of privacy because it's in plain text and can be read by technicians at every node of the internet on its way to delivery if they have a mind to do so.

Really? A Supreme Court that had any kind of hot anger about infringements on our liberties would find that the internet is the envelope and that the mere possibility of a technician along the way deciding to randomly dip into the hourly flow of billions of emails and out of boredom or idle curiosity pick out one email to read is not enough to entitle the government to argue that I had no expectation of privacy in the message after I hit "send." The technician and any other person with access to the guts of internet could easily be deemed to have the same right to read, extract, deliver or report what is in my message as my mailman, USPS truck driver, or clerk have, to wit, none.

Similarly, the fact that my bank records are in digital form in the custody of the bank in no way transforms them into hard copy records that I nailed to every tree down mainstreet for public inspection. Clearly this $600 threshold proposed infringes on a highly private matter and the clear language of the Fourth Amendment didn't get deep sixed just because the world went digital in a big way.

Well, the Supreme Court has groveled at the feet of big government ere since as witness its slobbering approval of a grotesque transformation of the federal government into a monstrous, untouchable juggernaut. So no help from that quarter most likely. Instead, we'll get a clump of digital age haruspicy from the chin strokers. A giant load of more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger BOHICA flapdoodle that comes with a rechargeable 200V battery. Obey, suckers!

At Gettysburg, Lincoln said we the living highly resolve that the nation "shall have a new birth of freedom." It seems like what we got was a Long March to tyranny and servility where piss ants infest the Congress, the Court, the executive branch, and most state governments and delight in the fleecing and oppression of the people.

Notes
^[1] "Rabobank: Today What Is Passing Is The Glorious Lie That Inflation Was Transitory." By Michael Every, ZeroHedge, 10/13/21 (emphasis removed).