As I stated in the opening of my post, the government is capable of good and exists for a reason. Regulations can be good. But people should recognize how much power the government has and see issues like civil asset forefeiture as an example of what can go wrong. I’m not saying the government cannot work. I’m saying that when it doesn’t work, the result can have an overwhelming negative impact, so we should be skeptical of government solutions.

I think that's a very naive perspective brought on by the perception that the government is a big monolithic entity so when the government does something bad, its the government's fault but when a corporation does something wrong it's specifically BP or Google or just one bad apple. The target of the public's ire becomes an entity with much smaller and better defined boundaries, ignoring every other corp that is doing the same exact thing. This process is also very self reinforcing. The only reason you know so much more about government abuses of power is because government is more transparent - the very feature that makes it such a powerful tool also puts it at a PR disadvantage.

I've seen far too much unethical and down right illegal behavior by management from inside companies, especially when dealing with privatized government functions, to ever trust them to do anything that they arent forced to (essentially at gun point). While, as an immigrant, I have an extreme distrust of American law enforcement, I would rather them than any private corporation.

I say this as someone who has been on the receiving end of civil asset forfeiture. My grandparents refused to take a bunch of cash that I had brought them in case the economic situation in Russia got worse and was taken for $20k and some priceless family heirlooms on the way back through LAX. It took a year and more money in legal fees than was confiscated just so I could get back some sentimental artefacts.

I think the real resolution here is that assumption of innocence works for all the other cases and in the one case where assumption of guilt until proven innocent exists we have real trouble. Civil forfeiture laws are terrible and end up generally being selectively enforced against minorities.

Nearly everyone I speak with about civil forfeiture thinks it's a bad idea with terrible incentives, so let's just enact some common sense and fix this one little thing, eh?