Second, it is politically and generally legally easier to prohibit a class of interactions involving a subset of the population (e.g. those who refused to be vaccinated against COVID) by way of prohibiting intermediaries from interacting with them. So for instance, restaurants were prohibited from serving the unvaccinated in many jurisdictions, but the unvaccinated were not prohibited from patronizing restaurants. The authoritarian policy was easier to enforce like this, because the direct target was commercial establishments, which is a smaller group whom the population at large is less likely to defend, and a group that is already subject to greater restrictions.
Easier still to enforce restrictions on would be handful of financial intermediaries. Another example would be restrictions on investment. The SEC prohibits companies from selling stock to the public without meeting onerous registration requirements, but it does not prohibit the public from buying stock from companies without SEC approval to sell stock. The ban on the stock issuer is enough to deny the public the ability to invest in non-SEC-approved stock, and it is politically much more viable than imposing prohibitions directly on the public.
The administrative and political cost of imposing authoritarian policies increases in proportion to the size of the set of parties that need to have their actions restricted to effectively enforce the policy.
The solution to, the government is extrajudicially spying on our transactions and without due process blocking people from their finances, is not a system that uses an immutable public ledger. It’s reforming the law to protect people’s right to privacy and due process. It’s getting rid of the authoritarian government that strips people of their rights and freedoms.
