Government Confiscation of Dormant Assets

Ted Bauman

From my father Bob Bauman, I inherited an affinity for the great American vaudeville and film comic, W.C. Fields. For those who remember him, W.C. is best known for his drinking habits and his creative partnership with another great star of his era, Mae West — she of “come up and see me some time” fame.

W.C.’s unique brand of humor — like that of the Marx Brothers, my appreciation for which signifies another Bauman idiosyncrasy — is rooted in a healthy disdain for convention and distrust of authority. But W.C. was like many of us in another way: he practiced a sound asset protection strategy.

You see, W.C. was in the habit of making small deposits — a few hundred dollars, say — at local banks in towns where he performed during his vaudeville days. His years of show business experience taught him that unscrupulous promoters, agents and the taxman could easily leave a traveling minstrel like him high and dry, financially speaking. And that would leave him dry in other ways as well.

But W.C. is surely turning in his grave, for in today’s America, all of that careful preparation would have been for naught: the government would just have taken his money for itself.

Police Militarization: The New Search and Seizure

Ted Bauman

As World War I drew to a close in November 1918, over 2.5 million soldiers of the Imperial German Army remained in the field. They brought training, experience and battle-hardened attitudes with them as they streamed back across Germany’s borders.

These soldaten soon found ways to deploy their skills at home. Supported by Minister of Defense Gustav Noske, right-wingers — including one Corporal Adolf Hitler — organized ex-soldiers into Freikorps, and armed them with surplus military weaponry. These militia brutally crushed Germany’s nascent post-war democratic movement. For the next 20 years, they provided the core of the feared Brownshirts, street thugs who helped Hitler and the Nazis into power.

Fast forward 100 years. Another faltering empire in domestic political crisis, the United States, brings its own frustrated warriors and their weapons back home …