One fine Saturday morning you go shopping and buy a TV, a PC, and other household appliances. Though the bill comes to around $13,000, you pay with cash, having had a recent influx of the green stuff. The next day, the police knock on your door. You immediately fear for your older relatives, thinking this may be bad news.
It is bad news. For you.
The police say they have a warrant to search your house, and proceed to ransack it. You ask why, and they tell you that your large cash purchase was “suspicious” of criminal activity.
They are not interested in your protests . . . until after they had done a lot of damage.
This didn’t happen to you — at least, I hope it didn’t. It happened to Jarl Syvertsen, a 59-year-old Norwegian man. In this case, it turned out that the police didn’t have a warrant at the time of the search. They’d lied. And Mr. Syvertsen notes that, had the police waited till Monday, when the banks were open, the whole issue could have been resolved with a phone call.
You see, Mr. Syvertsen had just received an advance on an inheritance. Quite above-board.
Economist Joseph Salerno relates this story to the “global war on cash,” undertaken to counter drug trafficking, which in turn has eroded civil liberties and privacy.
Some of my friends think that real Americans carry guns. If you want a truer and bluer (or greener) expression of your freedom and opposition to big government — and in general avoid spies in the NSA and elsewhere — there may be no better way than to pay cash.
But guns may be involved, later.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.