But morons like Patrick and Jeff have assured us we have nothing to fear.

Surely such boot lickers to state power can not be wrong.

And this is what makes the overuse of government surveillance so bad. With so many things illegal, from accounting mistakes to drug use, I can't imagine that there is anyone who has not broken some sort of law. When the government has unlimited surveillance capability, it means they can round up whoever they want.

Either one of these things, the overcriminalization or the surveillance would bad, but possibly tolerable. If everything is illegal but you can't enforce it, you could live with it, and if the government could see everything you do but it was all legal, then "you have nothing to hide" might have some meaning. But combined each provides the strongest argument against the other.

Again, I'm not saying that either one is by any stretch ok. But together they are exponentially worse.

Look at the HIPAA laws. A person could be on the hook for thousands if they dump a report in the garbage. And they can be sent to jail depending on how they do it.

Such as revealing health care information to a gay partner without the paper work filled out.

how to restructure our predatory financial system

Predatory? wait, say what?

Bank: we won't lend to you, sorry, you don't have enough steady income.

Person: You're discriminating against me! Racist!

US Government: Yeah, Bank, you are discriminating against them. Loan money to this Person, or we bring suit against you.

Bank: Wait...I can underwrite the loan and then sell it to Freddie or Fannie and get it off my books? and get the DoJ off our backs? And make money in the process? Genius!

liberals...are aping the punitive zeal of the authoritarians

There's a term for that: progressives. Go look up the first crop of progressives in the US. They brought us prohibition, and thought highly of Mussolini and later, Stalin.

If all laws applied equally to Congress, we'd see an end to this idiocy.

This also increases the chance that administrations can going after their political opponents. I was treasurer for a political campaign once. I concluded that if you gave me enough resources I could find a campaign finance violation for anybody.

Instead of pushing a debate about how to restructure our predatory financial system, liberals in their focus on individual prosecution are aping the punitive zeal of the authoritarians.

Behold the self-negating statement.

"Predatory financial system"? Did lenders hold guns to peoples' heads and force them to take out loans they knew they could never repay?

The only solution to preventing free people from making bad decisions is authoritarianism.

Besides, the statement conveniently overlooks the Community Reinvestment Act, which encouraged banks to think up schemes for recouping money the government forced them to throw down the crapper.

All that being said, it pains me to admit that Americans are crowd followers like everyone else. I never would've believed it. All it took was a critical mass of those entrusted with power to begin abusing it, and more and more followed along.

And the phrase "boot licker" is code for "I'm a crowd follower myself."

Everybody has to be part of a group, apparently.

Arkansas has had that draconian "eviction" law for years. There have been numerous attempts to overturn it or change the law, but the landlord lobby is too powerful here.

Besides, the statement conveniently overlooks the Community Reinvestment Act, which encouraged banks to think up schemes for recouping money the government forced them to throw down the crapper. -- Thomas Wictor at December 11, 2013 2:19 PM

The gun was held more to the head of the lending institutions than the borrowers. Unless the lending institution could absolutely prove that the loan was bad, they pretty much had to make a loan to the person. The CRA pretty much made that the reality.

Some of the banks and credit unions saw the future and did things like requiring a minimum of having an account for more than 6/12 months and similar that killed off the bad borrowers.

So I don't blame the lending institutions in general as predatory lenders but there was also a community organizer system that encouraged the bad borrowers.

Apologies. Somehow my bad internet connection put yhe prior comment on this one.

I blame LBJ. His Great Society programs infantilized great swaths of the United States. And then of course, we all needed minders.
P.S. to Thomas Wictor: You missed the question mark after your rhetorical question: "The only solution to preventing free people from making bad decisions is authoritarianism." Maybe at your house that works. Try that shit around my house and almost any of us is liable to make several bad decisions. And I'll stand by every one of them.

Say you shot an unarmed man and then your buddies burned his body as, you know, a favor sorta.

Then say you were, oh, wearing a badge.

"The benefit of the doubt has to go to the officer."

"You missed the question mark after your rhetorical question: 'The only solution to preventing free people from making bad decisions is authoritarianism.' "

I think what Thomas was saying is that that's the way the authoritarians see it, not that he believes that himself. Leftism is basically a political expression of narcissism. The leftists have convinced themselves that they alone among the entire human race have the capability of making good decisions, and therefore their lust for power over others is justified.