I respect you, and the tone you're using with me makes me think that perhaps I am missing something here. But I'm not getting what you're attempting to hint at.

Yes, if you believe you're going to end up in court, and having lots of money is useful for defeating charges, then yes, you should try to get money. That seems pretty simple and not worthy of enacting seizure laws.

If the justice system is so broken that people guilty of massive crimes can pay $50M and get out of charges, then THAT needs to be fixed. You're not seriously suggesting that seizure is a just way to hack around a broken system?

Thomas has a very instrumentalist / consequentialist / realist view of things. It sometimes makes him sound almost amoral. He sometimes gets caught up on the "is" side of "is / ought" discussions, which, as we know, have no resolution because they're two separate worlds.

You know, this may be true (minus the instrumentalism, which is a label I think applies better to the prevailing sentiment of HN), but I don't think it's "amoral" to ask whether the operators of massive criminal enterprises should be able to use the fruit of those operations to reduce the feasibility of prosecution. If you make $10MM selling illegal firearms, the proceeds of that operations aren't "yours"; they're assets generated by criminal activity.

You may be innocent of the charges. If you are, you should get the assets back. To the extent that asset forfeiture makes that process fraught, that's a problem that deserves careful scrutiny.

I submit that I don't sound "amoral" so much as that I don't have exactly the same set of biases that most vocal people on HN seem to have. I don't start from the premise that all prosecution is unjust or malicious; in fact, I think I start from the opposite premise. So when something happens like "all the assets of a business are seized as part of a prosecution", I ask myself, "why would people who have chosen to spend a significant part of their life working at sub-market compensation to help fight crime choose to do that?" Sometimes the answers seem clear to me; in other cases, like the Carmen Ortiz-managed prosecution of Aaron Swartz, they are less clear.

I didn't mean "amoral" as an insult, and I don't think you're amoral. You just seem that way sometimes (to me) in your apparent reluctance to view things[1] from the perspective of how they might be improved (i.e. how they "ought" to be), and rather argue about consequences (the way things are), with little regard for the justice of the larger machine that generates those consequences.

[1] Social / political / judicial / law enforcement things in particular. You've argued lots of times about how things can be positively changed wrt crypto, security etc.

PS: I don't think it's bias. Your perspective is also biased; it's just differently biased than the group average here. Your perspective is welcome and often refreshing.

I feel like I'm very concerned about the justice of the overall system, but that instances of injustice within it don't generally indict the whole system.

I admittedly don't have any evidence of this, but I suspect that "lets become as big and rich as possible" is usually high on the list of priorities for cartels and mobs already, for plenty of other reasons.