By CJ Ciaramella, Reason, December 3, 2024.
excerpt:
Indiana prosecutors will return $42,000 in cash seized from a small business in California. The move comes months after business owners filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that law enforcement is exploiting a major FedEx delivery hub in Indianapolis to seize millions of dollars in cash from innocent business owners.
Public interest law firm Justice for Justice (IJ) announced last week that the prosecutor’s office in Marion County, Indiana, will return funds to customers Henry and Ming Chen, who run a jewelry wholesale business in California. He announced that he agreed. Police seized cash from a FedEx package in transit from a customer in Virginia. The county prosecutor’s office then filed suit to seize the Chens’ funds through a process called civil asset forfeiture, alleging that they were involved in criminal violations. However, the complaint does not specify which law.
and:
“We are overjoyed at the prospect of getting our money back,” Henry Chen said in an IJ press release. What happened to my company should never happen to anyone. Indiana should stop trying to steal from law-abiding citizens by seizing property and then figuring out after the fact whether there is a basis to keep it. ”
Comments from the Human Resources Department:
First of all, it is not true that the prosecutor said, “Badge?” “I don’t need a stinky badge.”
Secondly, this is another win for the Institute for Justice, which is one of the charities I go to every year.
By David Friedman, David Friedman’s Substack, December 4, 2024.
excerpt:
Commenters asked how it was possible for Biden to be corrupt and yet a decent person. My answer is that I judge a person’s character primarily by how they treat those around them. People with whom we interact directly are more salient and more real to us than those who are far away, and even more so than those far away who are affected by the actions we take. Morally speaking, stealing from Walmart is the same crime as stealing from a friend or co-worker, but it doesn’t feel the same and leads to different predictions of future behavior. People who steal from friends will not hesitate to steal from Walmart if they think they can get away with it, but the reverse is probably not true. Anyone who plans to abandon their weekend plans to drive a friend to the hospital for a medical emergency and care for a child or pet until the emergency is over will donate $10,000 to a well-chosen doctor. He may not be as good for the world as the person who does it, but he shows better evidence that he is a good human being and someone his friends can trust. He’s a decent man.
and:
I saw this as not a question of what Joe should have done, but rather what Joe did that tells us about the kind of person he is. A Joe Biden who cared enough about keeping his promises, maintaining faith in the legal system, and his duty to the American people to send his beloved son to prison would be a better person than the Joe Biden who pardoned his son. Would be — but Joe Biden would not have accepted millions of dollars in bribes sent to his family through his son, and this time Biden did. Joe Biden, who repeatedly promised not to pardon him and yet put his son in prison to avoid the embarrassment and loss of status that would come with being pardoned, is a worse man than Joe Biden, who pardoned his beloved son. It will be. He may not be a sane human being – and this man might not be either.
Or maybe not. The pardon covers not only the crimes for which Hunter was convicted, but also any crimes he may have committed between January 1, 2014 and December 1, 2024. The innocent explanation is that Joe feared his son would be further prosecuted for a crime he did not commit. You will be in a position to protect him for a long time. Most innocently, Joe feared legal action against Hunter for a crime in which his father was an accomplice, which led to legal action against Joe.
DRH Comment: This is the most interesting thing I’ve read regarding Hunter Biden’s pardon. That doesn’t mean I completely agree with you. Notice in the first two sentences of the first quote above that David moves from talking about morality to talking about character. I want to say more, but I’m still thinking about it. I put this up because I think many readers will find it interesting.
By Jacob Salam, Reason, December 5, 2024.
excerpt:
What kind of “crime” did Patel have in mind? While lying about people can constitute defamation in some circumstances, it is not a crime, and civil remedies depend on lawsuits by affected individuals, not the Department of Justice. Election fraud is a crime if it involves fraud, such as the kind of fraud that President Trump claims denied him a legitimate victory in 2020. But Mr. Trump offered no evidence to substantiate his election-stealing fantasies, and in any case, the journalists who allegedly threw out the telephone votes or manipulated the vote count were not involved.
DRH Comment: Patel’s comment reminded me of the same misconception about freedom of the press that Tim Walz displayed in his debate with J.D. Vance.
Steven Greenhut, Reason, December 6, 2024
excerpt:
Last week’s big news was that the Justice Department said Google should divest from its Chrome browser to comply with a court finding that Google had monopoly power in its search business. “Google’s exclusionary actions, among other things, have led to Google becoming the near-universal default for search, with virtually every search access point routing valuable user query and interaction data to Google,” the government said. insisted.
It’s no surprise that successful companies dominate some aspects of the Internet market. Other companies are also free to develop their own search engines. I relied on Chrome because it was the best option for my research for this column. It doesn’t cost me anything to use it and I had other options, so it’s unclear how the government is protecting me. If the courts follow the Justice Department’s lead, investigations could become more complex and less secure.
As Google’s chief legal officer explained in a blog post, the Justice Department’s filing is an “unprecedented government overreach,” and for example, the federal government would require “two You are attempting to request “separate selection screens.” Government bureaucrats, lawyers, and courts shouldn’t dictate specific application designs, but that’s fine with populists. Because they’re stuck with Big Tech.
DRH Comment: Google’s lawsuit is reminiscent of the lawsuit against Microsoft in the late 1990s that I wrote about here. It also reminded me of the lawsuit against Alcoa in the 1940s. I quoted Judge Alcoa’s comments in my article about Microsoft.
CNBC, December 5, 2024.
