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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – When fascism comes to America… When Fascism Comes To America, It Will Look Like Justin Trudeau’s Canada.
Trudeau’s dangerous not just because he’s abusing Canadians, but because he is providing the wish list for crackdowns by Democrats in the U.S.: “every single bank, credit union, investment broker and insurance provider in the country has been deputized to figure out if they have a blockader as a client, and to immediately freeze their accounts if so.”
– William Jacobson
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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This is an old article, but I think it is a educational thing to think about. But one thing struck me:
every single bank, credit union, investment broker and insurance provider in the country has been deputized to figure out if they have a blockader as a client, and to immediately freeze their accounts if so.
What struck me is how perfunctory this is. Here in the USA since 9/11 we have had a set of banking regulations with the disturbingly creepy name “know your customer”. But it isn’t about “knowing your customer” it is in fact about “telling the government about your customer.” The simple fact is that our banking system is one big surveillance state. Somehow it became the bank’s job to search for terrorists (such as with the OFAC rules) or to look for criminal organizations (such as with the anti-money laundering rules and statutes) and even, more recently, enforce something a little short of a Chinese style social credit scheme where people with views unpopular with the government couldn’t open a bank account.
It used to be that bank secrecy was a thing, where the bank assiduously guarded the privacy of their customers. How we went from “bank secrecy” to “know your customer” is surely the story of the collapse of the free society. My God, even Swiss banks genuflect to the all mighty IRS.
So, Americans (and I imagine Brits) before you tut-tut-tut at the loathsome Trudeau, we might remember that saying about throwing rocks in a glass house.
I had two accounts in a CA bank at the time, one very small and one slightly larger.
I wrote a check to a fundraiser for the truckers.
Both of my accounts were “made inaccessible” within a few days.
The larger account was released to me a few weeks later. The smaller account only had about $500 in it, and was not released. I never got it back, and it wasn’t worth the hassle they wanted to put me through to fight it.
No American bank ever did anything like that to me.
The blogger of “The Nomad Capitalist” has this take on central bank digital currencies and the privacy threats they pose. A lot of folk, such as Tony Blair and so on, seem quite happy with centralised IDs for everything, and CBDCs are a logical step. The China-style social credit system could be integrated with it. What could possibly go wrong?