The right for scumbags to bank should be enshrined in law
If you can’t bank, you can’t operate in law-abiding society. Which means that if you’re denied banking, you’re going to turn to unlawful society, because you have to.
Even scumbags should be able to get a checking account.
Let me back up.
When I was at Axios, there was a low grade byline battle between me and the much more famous writer, Felix Salmon, over whether or not the crypto business had any place in the civilized business world.
Felix pretty much felt it didn’t. I thought it did.
In fact, our debate started before I ever got there. He had written that NFTs had no aesthetic merit and I countered him in the first op-ed that I ever wrote at CoinDesk. At Axios, he would write “The crypto dream has died” after the crypto exchange, FTX, fell, and I wrote that “crypto will be fine.” He would write that a pro-crypto president would undermine dollar dominance. I would write that it would preserve it.
And so on.
But there was one Salmon salvo in which he was wrong even as he wrote it, and — worse! — it looked to me that he had written it mainly be…