This is important for those of us who buy and sell at gun shows, car show, swap meets etc… Any place where cash makes the deal because sellers don’t want the credit card people taking a chunk out of their hard earned dollars.

Sometimes dealers from these sorts of shows come home with a bunch of cash to think that the police can pull folks over threaten them and seize any cash or other assets they might possess is anti-freedom, un-American and un-Constitutional.

The War on Drugs is subsiding and it isn’t hard to see how the supporters of a Police State are salivating at the thought of replacing it with a War on Guns.

These crusades do nothing to protect the right and freedoms guaranteed us in the Constitution.  They do nothing to promote safety.  Things like the TSA are a joke patting down and x-raying everyone instead of profiling because heaven forbid someone might be offended

Since when has it become okay to violate the Constitutional rights of everyone in order to catch a few who might be violating the law?

From Priceonomics:  http://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-from-innocent/

Jan 15, 2016

On February 17, 2014, a 24-year-old college student named Charles Clarke checked a bag at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport and parked himself in a chair near the boarding gate. Having just visited relatives, he was in high spirits, and eager to return to his home in Florida.

But Clarke’s day took an unexpected turn.

Two uniformed men — an airport police detective and a local Drug Enforcement Administration officer — approached by Clarke and corralled him into a fluorescent backroom. His checked bag sat on a table. One of the men turned to him and grunted, “This smells like marijuana.” An extensive search ensued, which yielded no trace of drugs in Clarke’s luggage. But buried between t-shirts, in the young man’s bag, the officers discovered something of greater interest: $11,000 in cash.

The cash, earned through five years of hard work at fast-food restaurants and retail outlets, represented Clarke’s life savings — money he intended to use for tuition fees. But the officers didn’t buy his story. Based solely on the fact that his bag “smelled like weed,” they claimed that the $11,000 was related to drug trafficking and seized it.<

Under the umbrella of “civil forfeiture,” officers of the law confiscate millions of dollars in cash from thousands of individuals like Charles Clarke every year. In doing so, they need no proof that the money is obtained through illegal means. They do not need to file a criminal charge. The law flips the American justice system upside down: the burden of proving innocence is on the “suspect” — and if he or she can’t do that, the property is fair game for officers to take.

Using cash that is unjustly seized from Americans, police departments across the nation buy firearms, SWAT gear, flat-screen TVs, and a slew of other goods they deem to be “essential” to operation.

But how exactly is this legal, and why is such a crazy procedure permitted in a country that prides itself on its civil liberties?

Continue reading at:  http://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-from-innocent/