Pete On Rails

Today, I received an email from my bank promoting their new Identity Guard service designed to help “protect” me from identity theft. For $12.99 a month, my bank proposes to monitor my credit reports and react quickly to any indication that my personally identifiable information has been stolen and used without my permission.

This is reactive. It’s alarmist. And it puts the burden on me, rather than on the companies that are doing a poor job protecting my data in the first place. I am annoyed.

What if banks do a good job protecting my personal information in the first place instead? Most of the recent identity theft stories in the media relate to the large scale theft of personal information from banks, credit card issuers, online retailers, or transaction processors.

Yet when my credit is hijacked because a financial institution is lax with security measures, I pay for it by having to deal with the fallout. The banks do not. And they ought to.

So to the banks and credit card issuers offering “Identity Guard” products, I say this: Step up to the plate and take some responsibility. Protect my data, and insist that all of your transaction processing partners do the same. Until they do that, I’m hanging on to my $12.99 a month. I’m not going to pay banks for doing a lousy job protecting personal information in the first place.

If “Identity Guard” were free, I’d be more likely to accept it as a potential solution. But financial institutions, transaction processors, and other data collectors have created this problem for us. I’ve never seen a sign in a trinket shop that read, “If we break it, you bought it…” My bank shouldn’t say it either.

It’s been a little over a week since I published my first story on Eminent Domain. I spent some time and energy deconstructing the philosophy of eminent domain, property rights, and capitalism. I concluded that the Supreme Court made a royal mistake when they allowed the New London Development Corporation to claim an acre of land from 7 holdout families in New London, CT. I still stand by that assertion, but I want to illustrate the other side of the issue.

I do believe that Eminent Domain has its place. Consider the most recent news about a man in the everglades who held out while the state wanted to restore the everglades using his property. In short, an ex-Navy SEAL (and a patiot, no doubt) was living a rural lifestyle on a 160-acre parcel of wetlands in the everglades. He had no electricity, no utilities, and was 40 miles from civilization.

In order to protect the everglades, Florida decided that they needed to run some bulldozers around his land, erect berms, dredge here and there, and generally screw up his rural lifestyle. In return for his 160-acres of swampland, he was paid $4.18 Million. That equates to roughly $26,125 per acre. To put that into perspective, the going rate for arable farmland in Iowa is between $10,000 and $20,000 per acre (if you can grow something on it). Now, I know that Iowa isn’t Florida, but as strange as it seems, I am heaving real trouble finding comparable lots. It seems that nobody has a bunch of swampland in Florida that they are willing to quote me a price on.

In any case, I think the reaction of Mr. Hardy (the ex-Navy SEAL multi-millionaire) to his forced relocation is particularly stunning: Jesse Hardy said he doesn’t know where he’ll go after his Dec. 1 deadline to move. “I’m just trying to enjoy every minute I can of what I have left out there,” he said. (CNN)

I think Mr. Hardy won’t have much trouble finding remote rural land. He could probably even find some in Florida. Failing that, he could relocate to West Virginia, where you can still get large tracts of land from MeadWestVaCo for a pittance. He could move to Alaska where they actually pay you to live there (residents receive a royalty check from oil companies every year.) Both of these states will allow you to live in a clapboard house. But, it’s cold there. Perhaps west Texas would be more suited to Hardy’s love for hot weather and dangerous creatures. You can still get cheap land there too.

What I am getting at is that in this case, the state had a legitimate public use for the land in question, and paid what appears to me to be a more than fair market value. Further, this guy has enough money to live where ever he wants, from Manhattan to just outside Denali National Park. Yet he’s trying to portray himself as a martyr who has been run over by the government.

Fair enough. He’s got to move and that is lousy. But the people who got the short end of the stick are the middle class landowners in New London, Ct, who are going to be paid $100,000 for a postage stamp sized house. These people will then be forced to watch New London Development Corporation build a Wal-Mart on their land, and make a fortune doing it.