There are now more than one thousand cases in thirty eight states. In Washington, d see the largest cluster in the country. It's happening in the New York City suburb of New Rochelle. The National Guard has been called at New states of emergency have been declared in Colorado, Massachusetts, and Michigan. We will see more cases and things will get worse than they are right now. Bottom line, it's
going to get worse. We have the for amid the assessment that COVID nineteen can be charactorized as a pandemic. We have already lost twenty four twenty four of our citizens. We're heading towards an epidemic in the United States, and the question is what the scope is going to be. Tom Hanks and his wife, the actress Rita Wilson, have
announced that they have both tested positive for coronavirus. To keep new cases from entering our shores, we will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next thirty days. That was a year ago today, and we have no idea how much more to there was to come. And um one of the things I'd like to ask Tim the lawyer about is the last year in terms of personal freedom and private property, since
he's an expert in that, and we'll get to that. Indeed, Tim the lawyer, Sandy First, the vice president for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute's were also written a number of interesting books, including The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski, Frederick Douglas Self Made Man, corner Stone of Liberty, Property Rights in twenty first America and Century America, and one of my favorites, The Permission Society, which was inspired by this dopey little radio show Tim Sander for how are you, Tim? I'm great?
How are you guys? Done? Terrific? I noticed from your Twitter picture that you changed it. I think you're planning on running for office. It has the look of a guy who's running for office. It really does have a sort of I'm I'm running for governor and kind of vibe to it. Yes, really intentional, but I just, you know, I thought I should update it because my my previous picture didn't have my COVID long hair. She still have the beard, do you? I do, and I have long hair,
hair hair down past my ears. At this point, I really need to take care of this. But you're standing in You're standing an electron in a suit and tie and like pointing in your mouth or open like you're really telling a crowd what's going on. So, yeah, Tim Lawyer, clearly running for office. Look, my wife has put her foot down about this that if I ever run for office, she will leave me, So that that has a wise woman.
So let's we are anxious to talk about just the liberty, the history of the last year in terms of liberty and how quickly we've given it up. But we want to pay heed to what you've been working on specifically these days, which is civil asset forfeiture, something a lot of people don't even understand exists. Oh yeah, and and I don't blame them because it's so contrary to the basic principles American liberty that it's it really stuns people
to learn that what goes on. And this is a legal principle that says that the government can take away your property on the theory that the property was involved in a crime and then just keep it without filing a charges against you and certainly without convicting you of any crime. They just come in and they take the property. And what happens then when they take it is that you get a little document that says, hey, we have your property. If you want it back, you have to
come come down to the to the police station. You have to sue us, basically, and of course when you do sue them, what that means is since it's technically considered a civil proceeding and since you are technically the plaintiff, the Fifth Amendment doesn't apply, which means that you can be forced to testify against yourself and you're required to prove your innocence instead of the government having to prove
your guilt. So what happens is basically the government, the police officers can target you, take your property, and then force you to come and pay to get it back. We'll give me an example, like, um, I get pulled over at night and they suspect me of drunk driving? Could they just take my carsly, and absolutely they could.
Or if you just have a lot of cash in the car, or if they just think that you have you know, might be engaged in some sort of drug traffing, trafficking or something like that, or even a relative of yours.
So just this week we've got a good result in a case in Massachusetts where the police officers seized our client's car because her son was engaged in drug crimes allegedly, and the police officers decided that she was involved somehow or the car was involved in somehow, and and took it and put it in an impound lot and left it there for five years before even serving her with the paperwork. Wow, they didn't even let they didn't even say, hey, by the way, you can get your property back until
this year when they took the property. In ten they took this car, and she was They never accused her of being involved in a crime. They've never filed charges against her, let alone convicted her in court or anything like this. They simply kept it. And guess what, when we showed up and said, hey, we're a bunch of lawyers and we're prepared to take this to court, they backed down and gave her back a car. And that
happens time and time and time again. The government takes this property on the on the in the assumption that you are too afraid to get it back. Now, there's no interest in the police, or there's no benefit to the police having a lot full of impounded cars. What's the incentive? Why is this happening a lot of the time. They sell it at those police auctions and things. They're also allowed to keep the cash they cash is very
often still seized by the government. And remember this idea is that it's supposed to be this is supposed to be a tool against big level drug kingpins, right like you see like back in the olden days when you saw it on Miami Vice, it was always they're gonna take some some big drug kingpins luxury yacht or something. But the reality is most seizures through civil asset forfeiture are very small, less than five hundred dollars in most cases, and most cases people are not even charged with a crime.
And this amounts to an enormous amount of money flowing into police departments since they're allowed to keep this money. In Massachusetts alone, in the past twenty years, it's been three hundred and twenty seven million dollars that has been seized through asset forfeiture that goes directly into the accounts of law enforcement, on top of the tax dollars that they already get. So there's reason to believe that some
of it is just a profit deal. Absolutely, we call it policing for profit because the these forfeitures pay for themselves, and the prosecutor is very often like to use that as an advertisement. They say, hey, this is a great program because it pays for itself. The reason why it pays for itself is because the government isn't bothering to have a lawyer actually show up in a trial court and prove the defendant guilty. They're just taking the cash
and pocketing it. And the law enforcement in this country has become truly addicted to this influx of cash, to the point that many law enforcement agencies don't even bother prioritizing crimes such as rape and murder, because those have no profit making aspect properly. They prioritize going after property from people that they say, in some vague terms, might
somehow be involved in a crime. We had a case in Tucson just a couple of months ago where the police seized our clients jeep because his girlfriend drove the jeep to a seven eleven in order to arrange for the sale of an ounce of marijuana. And they seize his brand new jeep. And when he said, I want my jeep back, they said, well, if you give us nineteen hundred dollars, We'll give you back the jeep. Where did the nineteen dollars come from? They just came up
with that amount. They just said, give us a little back, she'sh and will return the jeep to you. Then when we wrote them a letter and said, hey, by the way, now the guys hired a lawyer here at the Goldwater Institute, they back down. No, no, you can, you can, you can have your j back. You know, that's just the mom that's the mob. Well, how in the name of James Madison does this square with the Fourth Amendment? It absolutely does not. But what happened was this It's actually
a very very old legal principle. In fact, it was around in the Founding Father's day, and it was one of the reasons for the American Revolution. What happened was the British government expanded the authority of what was called admiralty courts, which were supposed to be governing crimes at sea, and the British government expanded their authority to allow British admiralty courts to hear cases that arose on land. And what they would do is they would do just this.
They would seize people's property and forced them to come in and prove themselves innocent of a crime. And the judge got to keep a cut of it if he ruled against the guy. So that's why when you reach the separation of Independence, the Declaration of Independence refers to this. It says, it says that the King has subjected us to a system of laws that is alien to our constitution.
They're talking about these admiralty courts which were engaged in asset forfeit your two hundred years ago, and yet we allow it to go on in the United States today because of of course, the drug War, the most famous of those cases. Of course, you are versus r which was decided in favor of our Tim, the lawyer Sander for Tim Sanders, the VP for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute. Jackie. Ready to move on to the last year and the
incursions in the verse. The President's given us address to the nation tonight, because it's one year ago today that the w h O officially declared to the pandemic. You can pick a variety of days of the China Love and Liars beginning. But as a guy has written books and spoken and thought a lot about private property and personal freedom. What's your overarching feel about this last year.
Is this shocking to you that these things happened, not surprising? What? Well, I would say that my overall feeling is that it's very complicated. It's a lot more complicated than people on either side really want to admit, because we're not talking about something that government has absolutely no business doing. Like when we're talking about something like eminent domainia, everment takes away your house and to build a shopping center there,
government has absolutely no business doing that whatsoever. But when you're talking about a pandemic and stuff, obviously government does have a legitimate role in protecting people against infectious diseases and things of that sort. So it's it's harder to draw clear lines. But what you find is a lot of the time the government says, oh, well, we've got this great idea, so we're gonna do this tray it truly crazy, wild thing based on what was originally a
good idea. And so you find things like in Pennsylvania, for example, and the governor says, well, we're gonna shut down all these businesses, but by the way, you can come to me and ask for an exemption, and I will grant exemptions based on purely arbitrary criteria. And I'm not even gonna tell you what my reasoning is as to whether or not people get exemptions. And by the way, my friends get exemptions, but other people don't, and that
sort of thing, and that's a real problem. And so there have been lawsuits all across the country over stuff like that, but those really do violate the Constitution. So it's hard to answer the question in the abstract. One thing, although I would say that is a real concern, is you mentioned my book The Permission Society, which was indeed inspired by conversations on your show. Especially Joe likes to say, whenever you hear the word permit, remember that a permit,
that's actually a verb. The government will permit you to do something. And the this we are sliding very quickly from a country where you are free to act unless you're harming somebody else into a permission society where you are not allowed to act unless the government allows you to. And when that happens, then you have to satisfy the government. Yes they mother may I before you do whatever the
thing might be. And I would say California, for example, has has basically become the permission society, where there's virtually nothing you can do without some kind of government approval, which depends on the largely arbitrary decisions of bureaucrats at
the city, county, state level, and so forth. Well, speaking of Unicornia, what really troubled me about the COVID response was that there are specific statutes that describe what an emergency is and when the government can invoke emergency powers, and there has been nothing close to an emergency for many months now in most California counties, and yet apparently the mechanisms for correcting that are too slow or something. How is Here's here's the thing when it comes to government.
So government wants to protect people's safety. Right, So let's say the governments and this is Let's say they're all being very conscientious about this. Let's put aside any question about bribery, self dealing, anything like that. Let's say these
people are all angels and they want to protect people's safety. Well, the safest thing to do in almost every circumstance is nothing whatsoever, right, Because if there there's always a risk to doing anything, we call it a type to error, as opposed to a type one error, which is when you go and do something and it really is risky and you don't know what you're doing. Right. A type two error is when you decide, well, gosh, better safe than sorry, and the there there's an old in fact.
Thomas a Quaintance, the old philosopher used to say, if if the captain's number one priority was safety, he would never leave port. And that's what happens when you prioritize safety over other concerns, is you actually end up hurting people more. For example, by withholding medical treatments that could save lives. You say, well, I don't know if I'm going to allow people to sell this medicine because it might hurt people. Well, yeah, but it might cure more people.
But see, the government won't get punished if it refuses permission. It'll get permission if it allows if it'll get punished if it allows permission and that thing ends up hurting people, then you then it's a scandal. Right, Well, how dare you allow the sale of this dangerous medicine? And that becomes a big deal. But if the government refuses to allow a good medicine to go out, well, nobody finds out about it, right, It never occurs to anybody because
it just never went on sale. So what the government does is it's overly conservative. And I don't mean that politically conservative. I mean it's temperamentally. It's overly conservatives. It's afraid to take risks, and there's no incentive to do so. Who wants to be the elected official in California who stands up and says, I don't know, I think it's time for us to waive this state of emergency and
then is wrong? Right? They're terrified of that, and so there's every incentive for keeping the state of emergency in place, and there's really no mechanism for eliminating in. What California and other states need to do is to have a law that says a state of emergency automatically terminates unless it is renewed by the state legislature. That's where it is, and California doesn't have that. Tim Sanderford, Vice Presidents, the
litigation for the Goldwater Institute. As always, we're sitting here wishing we can talk to you all day, but we really need to take a break. Tim, really interesting stuff. Keep fighting a good fight, thanks guys. Yeah, Kansas is doing that and every state needs to do that. Your your emergency powers last X number of days and then it has to be renewed by the legislature or perfect. That'd be a good outcome of this whole thing. More on the way