Free to transact
What rights do we need to guarantee our political freedom. Well, the right to speak freely, of course. The right peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Even in trucks.
But without economic freedom you cannot have political freedom. The right to work, which requires the right to hire. If the government, or political pressure groups, can stop you from being hired, you cannot speak, you cannot assemble, you cannot act politically. Communist countries didn't need to put people in jail. They could just stop them from working.
And the right to transact, freely and anonymously. If the government can monitor your transactions, freeze your assets, "sanction" you, or freeze your ability to transact, to buy or sell anything, it can quickly silence you, stop your political participation, undermine political movements or even aspiring individual politicians.
This is playing out in Canada right now. I have stated the principle before, but now we have a good example before us of just what the danger is. I don't care how you feel about the truckers, but look at the power the government has used to silence their political protest. The government can use the same power to silence individuals. Or protests from the left.
Reports that there are bank runs and outages as Canadians try to quickly take money out of banks are an interesting consequence.
This is going to be a hard question as we move to electronic transactions, whether fintech or crypto. If we have arbitrary, cheap, completely anonymous transactions, tax evasion, theft (ransomware), fraud, can go haywire. If we have complete surveillance and control, political liberty goes out the window.
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