By Andrew Langer. April 4, 2023. (Real Clear Policy)
In 2014, the Wall Street Journal blew the lid off the Obama-Biden Administration’s “Operation Choke Point”, where the Department of Justice and bank regulators colluded and overreached their authority to close legal businesses that were deemed “undesirable”. They did it through pressuring banks and credit card payment processors to close the accounts of people and companies that had not violated any laws, without any proof of wrongdoing. It’s happening again today, on a much bigger scale, against legal U.S. companies that use crypto technology for their product offerings.
It was illegal then. It’s illegal now.
As I have previously written, we are still in the infant stages of cryptocurrencies and associated crypto tech. Cryptocurrencies and the underlying technology don’t neatly fit into the related – but ultimately, different – legal categories and classifications for the agencies that regulate securities, commodities, currencies and all other aspects of commerce.
Congress and the federal government should have moved a long time ago to set out a regulatory framework that addressed this, so that American innovators could know how to legally operate and consumers could be protected from harm. It didn’t happen, and that has provided an opening for a panicked Administration to launch another illegal war on American businesses they don’t like and distract the public from their own economic mismanagement.