This scourge continues to spread:

Poland just voted to EXPAND the government’s power to freeze your assets without a court ruling. Say the “wrong” thing online, and you could wake up to a FROZEN bank account. The bill lets the Interior Minister sanction anyone accused of supporting foreign interference or information manipulation aimed at Poland. Bank accounts, property, even crypto can be frozen instantly by administrative decision, and appealing to a court won’t automatically lift the freeze. It passed 240 to 202 last week.

In Britain and Germany multiple people have had their bank accounts frozen for supporting Palestine. When government isn’t directly involved banks often do the dirty work themselves, for example German banks debanking AfD politicians. The same happened to Farage in the UK. In Canada we had the government freezing accounts of the protestors against vaccines who parked their trucks in Ottawa. (I didn’t support the truckers, but at the time I said the accounts shouldn’t be frozen.)

As the economy moves more and more to electronic payments, being without a bank becomes more and more a sentence to homelessness. And even the small cash window is often closed In Germany, when the government de-banks you they also make it illegal to give the de-banked person any money so they can eat or pay rent.

This method of control makes organizing against the government almost impossible. It’s done to individuals and organizations. It needs to end. At the very least it cannot be something that is done by executive fiat but which requires a judge and jury and a trial. If the issue is avoiding someone transferring stolen money, then the amount that is frozen needs to be limited: enough must be left to pay bills, eat and so on and there has to be a mandatory maximum period the money can be frozen for.

Every individual should have a guaranteed bank account. The simplest way to do this is that when someone comes of age and gets whatever number the government uses to track citizens (like the social security number) then an account is opened by the central tax authority or a postal bank. A card is issued and the account is capable of all the normal things a bank account does. If you want retail outlets (not a bad idea) go back to postal banking. This account can never be taken away from someone, ever, even if they go to prison.

This needs to be a constitutional right, because increasingly you simply can’t survive without a bank account and governments cannot be trusted not to use petty powers to destroy their enemies of the day.

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