[staunch]

The pain overdraft fees cause poor people is truly hard to comprehend unless you've been there. It's incredibly evil.

You've got $16 left for food and then then the Flickr account you forgot to cancel gets charged to your account, putting your balance at -$9. Now you have to pay $35/day until you get enough money to cover the overdraft fees. You end up paying $100+ for a $9 forced loan.

The bank could have just declined the charge and let you deal with it, but even though you have overdraft "protection" turned off, they've decided to classify this transaction as an on-going contractual relationship, letting the charge through so as not to "inconvenience" you. Bankers are inventive at skirting the law.

They know exactly what they're doing. They're rich bankers robbing poor people.

I won't be satisified until Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and all these other evil American banks pay back every single dime to their victims.

Until then, no one should even consider helping these evil banks when there are good ones available. USAA is great.

[mikekchar]

There are a couple of times in my life when I was quite poor (for someone living in a G8 country...) The biggest thing I learned was to use cash. Cash is awesome because you can see how much you have and you can't spend more than you have. Even now that I am relatively well off, I have my habitual routine of getting cash at the beginning of the week and spending only that for the week. In fact, I make sure that there is always a bit left over at the end of the week (because there are always surprises).

The thing that is frustrating for me in western countries is that using cash is becoming more and more difficult. The last time I tried to rent a room at a hotel in Canada, they would not accept cash -- credit card only.

In the UK, I used to use my Oyster card (a pre-paid travel card for public transit in London). I could basically use it like cash. You put in whatever money you want at the beginning of the week and then you can use it without worrying about over spending. If you ever travel in London, be aware that the payment system is buggy as hell and they will over charge you badly. With the Oyster card it's great because I can notice that my balance is lower than it should be, go online and get a refund (seriously ... it happened at least 3 times a week for me!!!) But now they are pushing using your bank card as a payment mechanism. They have access to all of your money and you have many less ways of detecting when they have overdrawn (or penalized you for the failure of their equipment to register your badging in).

Again... these companies know exactly what they are doing.

As an aside... I often wonder what happened to the laws about accepting legal tender. There are a number of times that I've been refused service because I wanted to pay cash (hotels and car rentals being the biggest culprits). Is this actually legal?

[silveira]

Civil forfeiture laws in the US. I don't feel safe carrying a reasonable amount of cash. Here the police can just rob me, and now I'm guilty until proven innocent.

In DC it costs up to $2500 for the right to challenge a police seizure in court, it's complex, expensive and it can take years.

[rhino369]

You are way more likely to get stuck up by a mugger (aka the real cash risk). But 2500 is insane. Is it really that much? Or does that include attorneys fees.

[akshatpradhan]

>You are way more likely to get stuck up by a mugger (aka the real cash risk).

Can you provide citations? Thanks!

[jonas21]

There were an estimated 345,031 robberies in the US in 2013, of which 42.5%, or about 146,000, were street/highway robberies (muggings) [1].

For the 13 years between Sept. 2001 and Sept. 2014, the Washington Post analyzed records from the DOJ and found 61,998 civil forfeiture cases "that were not made at businesses and that occurred without warrants or indictments". This is around 4,770 per year. [2]

Neither of these are broken down by location, race, etc. so your particular circumstances may vary, but at the aggregate level, you're about 30 times more likely to be mugged than to have assets seized at a traffic stop.

[1] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/08/th...

[JoeAltmaier]

Wow, but I don't expect my public servants to stick me up. Something terribly twisted about that.

[khuey]

Realistically, if your choices are the police who might rob you, and bankers that will rob you ...

[sremani]

Technically, the cash is guilty not you.

[a3n]

I guess if cash is speech then cash can be a person too.

Can I send my cash to jury duty? :)

[venomsnake]

I think that we can skip the middle layer wetware and just elect cash president. With the (multi) billion campaign season that comes - who is in charge will be just a formality.

Side note - how amazingly high ROI you got with donations to politicians - for a couple of hundred of million - you get people that oversee and direct the 3-4 trillion dollar federal budget (scale to state level too).

[ams6110]

It rarely happens. Like cops shooting unarmed people in the back, it isn't something that you really need to worry about.

[TDL]

Even if it's (asset forfeiture) a statistically rare event, we have to worry about it because it is a deeply corruptive practice. Asset forfeiture goes against much of the philosophical underpinnings of this nation.

[eevilspock]

sadly, ams6110, HN is allergic to sarcasm.

[gizmo686]

Being legal tender means that something must be accepted as payment for a debt; it does not mean that it must be accepted as payment when no debt exists. For example, if you go to a restaurant that serves you before giving you your check then they are required to accept cash. However, they are allowed (possibly depending on jurisdiction) to insist on being payed by card prior to serving you.

[dkuntz2]

There's very little incentive to accept card only. Cash, unlike credit or debit cards, doesn't carry an interchange fee, which means the full amount is going to the business, instead of losing some money to interchange.

[DanBC]

UK Banks charge fees for handling cash.

[pyre]

> The last time I tried to rent a room at a hotel in Canada, they would not accept cash -- credit card only.

This has more to do with the hotel's liability. If you steal from the hotel or damage the room, they will apply those extra charges to your credit card. Even if your credit can't cover the costs, your verified credit card information tells them that you didn't provide a false name, and they have someone to chase after to recoup the charges.

[mikekchar]

I live in Japan now. In Japan they take a photocopy of some ID containing your address for that purpose.

My understanding is that the reason hotels want a credit card is that they pre-charge it with a deposit and then refund it when they check the room. You never see the pre-charge transactions so you don't know about it.

I have successfully negotiated with some hotels to take cash by offering them a cash deposit. Some hotels refuse to do it, though. I don't even have a credit card any more (mostly out of choice, but also because Japanese banks tend not to give credit cards to non-permanent residents), so the next time I travel in the west (soon) is going to be an adventure...

[pyre]

> so the next time I travel in the west (soon) is going to be an adventure...

Well, there are pre-paid credit cards. You could always try those, but IIRC some hotels refuse to take them.

It's also easier for the hotel to just charge extra to the credit card than to track down the person and possibly send the debt to collections. I've personally witnessed (while working for a hotel/casino) people get charged for things that they took from the room (robes, towels, etc) on the day that they checked out. At that point, the hotel already has the money, and dealing with the charges is the customer's problem. If they just took down information, then they have to spend time chasing down the customer to get them to pay the extra bill. From what I know of Japanese culture, delinquent customers are probably not as much of a problem as they are in (e.g.) the US.

While I can understand how much harder it is for hotel patrons without credit cards, hopefully you can also see it from the hotel's perspective when dealing with "bad faith" customers.

[nandemo]

Banks certainly issue credit cards to non-PR foreigners. I got one as a student. My initial limit was very low, though (100,000yen~=1000usd then).

I know people who got refused cards by multiple banks before succeeding. But it's not nearly as hard as getting a home loan, which usually does require PR.

[polm23]

If you change your mind about having a card, ANA cards are relatively easy to get for foreigners.

[mrb]

I wonder if there would be an interest in a virtual credit card (NFC smartphone) showing you how much money you can spend for, say, the rest of the week. You would be able to configure your desired spending limit. The virtual credit card app would automatically be able to update the amount of money spent whenever recurrent charges are processed automatically. The idea is that whenever you pull your smartphone to pay, you always see exactly how much you have spent so far. As opposed to the situation today where nobody logs in multiple times daily on their bank/credit card website to check how much they have spent.

[tomtang0514]

Here in HK and Shenzhen we have similar thing called Octopus card where you can use it on almost anything other than buying house or cars or "high-class" shopping. An even better part is that almost all octopus card scanner has a display for the amount just charged so you can dispute right away. To encourage people to use them, there're even discount stands on the street. A "discount stand" is basically a machine that you can scan your card and get $2 off your next purchase. Yes, that's its only functionality and you don't have to input email or any BS, just scan it. That's my favorite part of HK.

[mr_green_tea]

> The last time I tried to rent a room at a hotel in Canada, they would not accept cash -- credit card only.

> In the UK, I used to use my Oyster card (a pre-paid travel card for public transit in London). I could basically use it like cash.

You might want to consider a pre-paid credit card :)

[fmueller]

> The last time I tried to rent a room at a hotel in Canada, they would not accept cash -- credit card only.

In Switzerland one must - by law - accept cash as payment. Is this different in Canada?

[ssimpson]

USAA also batches their debts and payments differently than other banks, to help their members minimizes any fees incurred. Their customer service saying is "assume positive intent" and they have amazing service. I will probably be a customer for life.

[tlrobinson]

For awhile Bank of America did the exact opposite, ordering transactions each day from largest to smallest to maximize the number of overdraft fees. Fortunately that truly evil practice was put to an end when they lost a $410 million class action lawsuit.

[thrownaway2424]

I worked at a company that developed hardware (check scanning) and software for banks. _Every_ bank wanted the feature that batches transactions on accounts from largest to smallest, to maximize the overdraft fees. That was in 1994 so it has been going on for a long time.

[a3n]

The other day I took a picture of a check that I received, with their phone app. They credited the check to my account immediately. Not "pending," it was in there with no unusual note. I assume it would have been on me in some way if the check bounced, but still.

If you're eligible, you should join USAA.

[guac]

That's standard practice with USAA. My first few checks had a pending status but after that (100s of checks later) they all posted immediately. Same thing happened when I signed up my wife. It's a selling point of USAA.

My paycheck also posts immediately, I get "paid" Thursday while everyone else I work with gets it Friday.

[MichaelGG]

Hah and with Wells Fargo, a check from one account to another will take a day or two. Online transfers take up to three.

[e40]

USAA is, indeed, an exceptional bank. Hard to get in, though, unless you have served in the military or have a parent that did. My father was quite surprised when I asked him to sign up for a website account (not bank account) so I could use that to join.

You see, USAA was one of the first banks to have an Android check deposit app. Years before B of A.

[colanderman]

Oh it's better. I've seen a poster on a commercial bank in the US which advertised a usurious loan (I forget the exact rate but it was up there with pay-day loans) that was only in Spanish while all its other products were advertised in English.

[ams6110]

Never never never bank with the big national banks like Chase, BoA, etc. Find a local bank or credit union, they are generally much more reasonable with their fees and penalties and often have free overdraft privileges (with some caveats -- understand those!).

Never set up automatic payments directly from your bank account. Pay your bills manually, once or twice a month whatever fits best with your cash flow.

[rokhayakebe]

The bank could have just declined the charge and let you deal with it

Wells Fargo will charge you $35 even if they decline the charge. So they don't pay because you don't have enough money, and on top of that they charge you for not paying.

[djloche]

I wish USAA would open their net a little bit to extended families. My brother is a doctor in the US Navy, but that supposedly wasn't 'close' enough of a family relation for me to qualify to do business with them.

[bradleyankrom]

Navy Federal CU is also very good, it may be worth checking their membership requirements.

[rdl]

Navy Federal CU and Pentagon Federal CU are both awesome and it's a $25 membership in an affiliated charity to get a membership.

The really elite one to get would be Tower Federal CU (the NSA's credit union); there is an affiliated nonprofit, which I joined, but then when I applied to open an account, I was declined. Oh well.

[mbrameld]

Why do you think it should be?

[nulltype]

I guess the counter question is why is USAA only available to military members?

[MBCook]

Basically a values thing that they are dedicated to military personnel and their families. Some of their products are open to everyone (IIRC), but most are limited to military, spouses, and immediate family.

From Wikipedia:

USAA was founded in 1922 by a group of U.S. Army officers to self-insure one another when they were unable to secure auto insurance because of the perception that they, as military officers, were a high-risk group.

[tsotha]

USAA isn't a bank, it's a credit union. It's "field of membership" is uniformed military and their families.

[a3n]

Actually, USAA is a bank. At least the bank part of them is a bank. They're also an insurance company, an investment company, and a few other things. But the banking part is a bank.

From their site's front page: USAA means United Services Automobile Association and its insurance, banking, investment and other companies. Banks Member FDIC. https://www.usaa.com

Notice the FDIC. Credit unions are not insured via FDIC, they use NCUA. http://www.gobankingrates.com/banking/fdic-versus-ncua-insur...

[nulltype]

Can anyone recommend a credit union as good as USAA that accepts people unaffiliated with the military?

[astrange]

Online banks like Capital One 360 don't charge overdraft fees and have fast check settlement. I can't comment on transaction ordering or anything - also, it might be hard to find an ATM that will do cash deposits.

And not only is there no account fee, but the checking account pays a pitiable amount of interest.

[jschwartzi]

It's a very low risk group of people compared to the general populace.

[djloche]

USAA provides unrivaled quality customer service. I would love to be their customer primarily for that reason.

[mkaziz]

USAA - The United Services Automobile Association?

[nkozyra]

https://www.usaa.com/

[artursapek]

I highly recommend USAA for checking/savings accounts. Been with them for 5 years or so.

[MBCook]

I've been with them a lot longer, my parents decades. Never had a problem with them.

[vacri]

> even though you have overdraft "protection" turned off

If you've explicitly opted to turn off overdraft protection, then the bank should honour that and let the payment through. The bank has no idea how vital that charge is for you. The problem is in the ridiculously onerous penalty.

[joe5150]

There are also good banks that, unlike USAA, most people can actually join with minimum hassle. CapOne360 and Ally have both done me very well, no connections needed.

[nandemo]

*> You've got $16 left for food and then then the Flickr account you forgot to cancel gets charged to your account,

I don't want to be rude but I wonder what set of circumstances leads a poor person to subscribe to a relatively superfluous service (unless you're a pro photographer?) in the first place.

[maehwasu]

Could happen from anything. I've also been poor, and one thing that sent me over the edge was a check that someone waited months to cash. Thought I had $200 in my account, and made a payment with debit card, only to go under $0. What's worse, I wasn't notified, and made a couple more charges, all at exorbitant rates, until I realized what had happen.

As always, it's best to interpret others' comments in the most generous way possible, rather than jumping to the conclusion that the poor person must have been spending too much money to pull himself up by his bootstraps.

[JoshTriplett]

> I've also been poor, and one thing that sent me over the edge was a check that someone waited months to cash. Thought I had $200 in my account, and made a payment with debit card, only to go under $0.

While this isn't something that is directly taught (a checking account ought to come with detailed guidance), if you write checks, you should use your checkbook to track your actual effective balance separate from how much the bank thinks you have. If you write a check, no matter how long ago, you don't have that money anymore, so you can't spend it.

People often don't bother updating a check register each time they write a check, but if you have any serious threat of running out of funds in your account, you need to take the time to balance it to know how much you have.

(Also a great reason to never use personal checks at all.)

But the lack of any guidance in this regard, while supplying many ways to ask for your "current balance" (a complete fabrication once you've written any checks) is certainly one more way banks do nothing to prevent you from falling into a costly trap. I was lucky enough to receive very careful explanations of how a checking account really works when I was young.

[doki_pen]

Good point, but when they are charging 2300% APR, they could afford to give you a call or email you after the first overdraft. They are acting predatory and we shouldn't make excuses for them. All financial relationships in a capitalist system should be mutually beneficial.

[nandemo]

> As always, it's best to interpret others' comments in the most generous way possible, rather than jumping to the conclusion that the poor person must have been spending too much money to pull himself up by his bootstraps.

Honestly, I didn't jump to any conclusions -- perhaps you're not interpreting my question in the most generous way?

[omonra]

I mostly agree with you (99%) except the part about 'Rich bankers robbing poor people'. The bankers devising this are not rich - they are very much middle class MBAs who are struggling to meet ends meet, what with high cost of property in good school districts, etc.

It the same guys who develop devilishly complicated cell phone plans, cable tv plans, drug packets that are 8oz big but contain 4 pills that would fit in a 1oz packet, etc. There must be an MBA school course 'How to screw over people with IQ lower than 90'.

What i'm saying is that it's not a rich vs poor but rather intelligent vs less so (or just people who fail to pay sufficient attention).

[Touche]

> They know exactly what they're doing. They're rich bankers robbing poor people.

I can understand thinking that the "correct" thing to do here is to simply not allow a transaction when there aren't sufficient funds, but this language goes overboard. It's not robbing a person because they were unable to keep track of how much money they own and adjust accordingly.

[Bud]

No. Emphatically, no. It IS robbery. Have you ever been a poor person? Have you ever been overwhelmed with depression and the panic of a lost job, a few dozen bills you probably can't pay, the shame of asking friends and relatives for help, and in so doing, risking your relationships with those people and your own self-esteem?

What you're missing here is that poor people KNOW that they are poor and right on the edge. They are already making a lot of adjustments that you probably can't even conceive of. They have a daily, hourly even, intellectual load from financial panic that more privileged people cannot even imagine.

The banks are the guilty party, here. They know that some of their customers are near the edge and in trouble, and they are strategically choosing to exploit them. Period, paragraph.

[yummyfajitas]

Have you ever been a poor person?

This is a fallacy. If you were to claim AGW occurs or that outer space is a vacuum, it would be a fallacy for me to say "have you ever been planet-sized body warming due to excess CO2?" Of course not, but one can still reason about such things.

If you are claiming that the poor are incapable of taking responsibility for their choices, recognize that there is a term for this: incompetent. Are you claiming the poor are incompetent and unable to make choices like the rest of us?

[OrwellianChild]

@yummyfajitas - I often appreciate the clear thinking you can bring to a discussion, but I just as often see you reduce human beings to logic machines in ways that are unfair to both them and your intellect...

There is a large and growing body of research around the limitations and capabilities of human decision making that shows just how/when these gaps appear. At a very basic level, poor (and otherwise distracted/overwhelmed) people suffer from decision fatigue [1]. There is much more going on, however, and I'm sure you'd find the studies fascinating, given your penchant for data-driven analysis. I cannot recommend Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow for starters...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue

[Touche]

> No. Emphatically, no. It IS robbery. Have you ever been a poor person?

Yes, I overdrew my account when I was in college and had $50 to my name. It was my mistake, I made a purchase unsure of how much money I had.

I also used to work for a bank that gave out RALs so I'm perfectly aware of the unethical behavior that happens in banking. So call it unethical, call it what it is. Using inaccurate alarmist language does not help the matter.

[tdfx]

As a college student, I am assuming that you didn't have much money, but also likely had rather limited expenses. To the family with children that has $50 to their name, a rent payment, childcare expenses, etc, most of which they can barely afford already, an unexpected overdraft can be the trigger that sends them off a financial cliff.

Poor people often make very bad financial decisions. But so do rich and middle class people. The difference is that the poor people have no one to turn to for help. Exploiting that may not fit the statutory definition of robbery, but it meets it in every other way I can think of.

[Touche]

All true, but you can't regulate away bad decisions. By attempting to do so you just make the next scheme even more disgusting.

[maehwasu]

Challenge accepted. I am going to regulate this problem away. New proposed regulation:

1. Banks must make rejection of a charge, rather than overdrafting, the default.

2. When overdrafting is enabled, cap the fees at some amount (say, $5), and also cap the amount the account can be overdrafted at, say, $50.

Looks like a pretty disgusting scheme to me. /sarcasm

[logicchains]

You can't regulate away bad decisions, but you can regulate away the consequences (by shifting them onto the wider population). Not that I support this, as I believe it unfairly penalises people who make good decisions, but it's certainly possible.

[nicksergeant]

Being in college with $50 to your name does not qualify you as poor.

[rfrank]

The unethical behavior in question is robbery. End of story.

[pyre]

Large banks will do things like structure charges so as to extract the maximum amount of overdraft charges. For example:

  You have $40 in your account. You spend $20, then $12,
  then $5, then $120. One would logically conclude that at the
  end of the day, the bank will resolve these *in order* and
  you will have a single overdraft fee. Large banks *cough*
  Bank of America *cough* will explicitly structure those charges
  to resolve like this: $120, $20, $12, $5. Now you have 3
  overdraft fees ($35 a pop when I was with BoA) instead of a
  single overdraft fee.

Do you not see anything morally and ethically wrong with this?

[jeffasinger]

The even crazier thing about your example, is that they have different offerings for their high net worth" clients, and with those offerings, the structuring is usually much more in the favor of the client than what someone walking in off the street will get.

Essentially, a poor person will be charged higher fees than a rich person.

[rcarrigan87]

I've personally experienced this, so frustrating!

[Touche]

> Do you not see anything morally and ethically wrong with this?

That's not the language the person I was responding to used.

[danharaj]

They don't have to because most people know that powerful institutions tend to act in bad faith in order to extract as much gain as they can from the vulnerable.

[Touche]

Yes! We do know this. Which makes getting screwed a highly avoidable situation.

[pyre]

So when people act in bad faith it is "ok" so long as we mistrust them anyways?

[tsotha]

Wasn't the law changed so they can't do this any more?

[ars]

Yes, it was.

[karamazov]

Banks make keeping track of the money in your account intentionally difficult. You can't just check your balance and assume that you can spend what's there.

Instead, your balance includes only processed transactions, whereas your account also has a list of pending transactions that can hit your balance at any time. Pending transactions can also disappear from your account, only to come back as a confirmed transaction. In effect, you can't be sure of exactly what's in your account unless you manually keep track of every charge you've made.

Banks do more than this to make overdrafts difficult to deal with. For example, Bank of America intentionally processes your transactions from largest to smallest, ensuring you'll git hit with the maximum number of overdraft fees.

e.g: if you have $10 in your account, and you make a $3 purchase, a $4 purchase, and a $12 purchase, they'll run the charges in the order of $12, $4, and $3, hitting you with three fees instead of one.

tl;dr: banks love overdraft fees and do whatever they can get away with to hit you with them.

[jellicle]

> e.g: if you have $10 in your account, and you make a $3 purchase, a $4 purchase, and a $12 purchase, they'll run the charges in the order of $12, $4, and $3, hitting you with three fees instead of one.

Even better, if you have $10 and also a $500 paycheck hitting your account that night, which is to say that the bank KNOWS there is no overdraft and that you have the money in the account, they'll process them in this order: -$12 (fee), -$4 (fee), -$3 (fee), +$500 (most eaten by the fees).

And some programmer programmed that for them. Intentionally.

[CydeWeys]

I believe there is now a national banking regulation in effect that requires all credits in a day to be processed against your balance before all debits. So in your second situation, at least, you would no longer be hit with fees.

[moron4hire]

If that is the case, then PNC hasn't got the memo yet.

[moron4hire]

They also transact debits before credits, so if you realize you made a purchase that will overdraw you, you can't deposit money right away to avoid an overcharge. I've gotten hit with low balance fees for that with PNC. Yeah, no, not overcharge. They didn't like that I very briefly had $5 less than $2000 in the account.

They call it "maintenance". Like an account at $1995 needs some screws tightened or something. This isn't the 1920s. There isn't some clerk somewhere checking ledger sheets. It's all digital. It doesn't matter what value is in there. It's just a bit pattern.

In other "you have got to be fucking kidding me" moments, I once got charged a late payment fee on a loan that said I owed $0 that month because I had been making payments ahead for several months prior. Had a rainy day, needed some extra cash, figured since it said "you owe nothing this month" that meant I owed nothing that month. Apparently, buried deep in the promissory note, there is a term whereby I was required to pay a certain minimum every month, regardless of what the statement said.

They then used this as an excuse to jack up my interest rate. Aren't student loans grand?

[knowaveragejoe]

> Banks do more than this to make overdrafts difficult to deal with. For example, Bank of America intentionally processes your transactions from largest to smallest, ensuring you'll git hit with the maximum number of overdraft fees. e.g: if you have $10 in your account, and you make a $3 purchase, a $4 purchase, and a $12 purchase, they'll run the charges in the order of $12, $4, and $3, hitting you with three fees instead of one.

I remember hearing about this a while ago, is that still going on? I thought some sort of regulation came into effect that prevented that, and that's why I was just then hearing about it.

[kelnos]

If the customer had set up the overdraft "loan" feature, then sure, I'd agree with you. But they didn't. How is it sane (and legal) to automatically loan someone money to pay something, without their permission, when you can set whatever repayment terms you want? Declining for insufficient funds is the only correct thing to do in that case. And yes, banks will usually charge a fee for that, too, but at least it'll only be a one-time fee.

[cookingrobot]

It's a not consensual extraordinarily high interest loan. Robbery is a fine label to use for that.

[Touche]

It's absolutely consensual; it only happens if you overdraw your account.

[cookingrobot]

They're not asking for a loan, they're asking to withdraw their own money that they put in the bank. The bank deliberately chooses to turn this into a loan if they accidentally ask for more than is currently there.

[fredkbloggs]

Let's talk about the word "accidentally".

Suppose I drive to a bar, have three beers, and drive home. I don't bother to check my BAC; I just assume I'm below the legal limit and can drive safely. On the way, I accidentally run over a budding young Progressivist on the street, who then dies. When the sheriff shows up, he finds that my BAC is 0.09 -- just over the limit!

Surely, you will agree that any penalty I am assessed for this should be minimal. After all, I did not intend to kill anyone. I did not think I was drunk. Sure, I didn't bother to check, or to assume the worst and take a couple hours' break before driving. But it was an accident. I didn't know that I was over the limit. Maybe I hadn't even read the law, and didn't know what the limit was, or what the penalties would be for exceeding it. Obviously, any big, mean, nasty "justice" system that would impose a heavy penalty on me for this act is evil and unethical.

Right?

[Retra]

Except, in your analogy, you are being force-fed alcohol by your landlord, car insurance laws, gas stations, any children you have, public dress laws, ISP, electric company, phone company, and the biological need for food.

This puts your default BAC at somewhere between .06 and 0.085 at any given moment. Now if you go over 0.09, do you think maybe that might happen on accident?

[jrockway]

Did this hypothetical event take place in New York City? If so, the NYPD would probably throw a parade in your honor.

Even if you were a driving a commercial truck and ran over a kid walking to school while driving without a license, they still wouldn't press charges.

[rokhayakebe]

It is robbery, I am perplexed how you fail to see it.