Libertarian Party of Montgomery County
Promoting liberty throughout the Greater Dayton area and the Miami Valley
“They’ve taken my car and tried to throw me in jail, but I’m still standing,” Reeves said in the Institute for Justice press release. “I’m not going to take the county’s threats sitting down. This isn’t about money or payback. This is about making sure the county can’t do this to anyone else.”
States that wish to avoid making the same mistake should view Massachusetts as a warning, not a role model.
https://reason.com/2023/03/09/massachusetts-tobacco-ban-went-as-badly-as-youd-expect/
Civil asset forfeiture in the U.S. is now a form of government piracy flying under a false and flimsy flag of lawfulness.
The county’s arguments would create a loophole allowing any state to take property without compensation, no matter how well‐defined the property interest, merely by changing the state’s definition of property.
https://www.cato.org/blog/supreme-court-should-end-home-equity-theft
This is more a matter of where two property owners’ rights begin and end than of the value of property rights versus their denial.
https://ij.org/cje-post/vigorous-property-rights-in-vermont/
We have held that “[p]rotection against excessive punitive economic sanctions” is “‘fundamental'” and “‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.'” And all that would mean little if the government could evade constitutional scrutiny under the Clause’s terms by the simple expedient of fixing a “civil” label on the fines it imposes and declining to pursue any related “criminal” case.
The platforms may have thought they had little choice but to please the CDC, given the tremendous pressure to stamp out misinformation. This pressure came from no less an authority than President Joe Biden himself, who famously accused social media companies of “killing people” in a July 2021 speech.
https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-police/
In 1987… just 29% of people charged with federal crimes were jailed before trial; the rest were released back to their families. But today, pretrial jailing has become the norm, and we conclude that “the culture of detention” is to blame: