Kiss your financial privacy goodbye: American politicians are systemically destroying the right to confidential banking.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top

It started, as so many bad things do, with Richard Nixon. In 1970, in the midst of a national panic over crime and illegal drugs, the man whose presidency would later become synonymous with official criminality signed the Bank Secrecy Act, which compelled all U.S. financial institutions to create a Currency Transaction Report--containing name, address, bank account data, and Social Security number-every time a client executed a cash transaction larger than $10,000.

"While an act conferring such broad authority over transactions such as these might well surprise or even shock those who lived in an earlier era," wrote Supreme Court Justice William Douglas four years later, upholding the law in California Bankers Association v. Shultz, "the latter did not ... live to see the heavy utilization of our domestic banking system by the minions of organized crime as well as by millions of legitimate businessmen." Airy principles may sound nice on paper, but these were dangerous times.

Before that moment, banking privacy had been broadly understood to be protected by the Fourth Amendment's invocation against "unreasonable searches and seizures" of Americans' "persons, houses, papers, and effects," unless the searchers were backed by a warrant. Behind that constitutional interpretation was a moral argument, backed by centuries of experience.

Financial anonymity as we know it was invented in Geneva, Switzerland, in the 16th century, by Protestant Reformation leader John Calvin. In converting his pretty mountain lake town into a refuge for Europeans fleeing marauding Catholic governments, Calvin loosened papal restrictions on lending at interest and embraced individual privacy as a means of self-defense against a predatory state.

As banker Xavier Comtesse explained to Swiss Info in 2009, "The description 'banking secrecy' is actually incorrect--'protection of the private sphere by the bank' would be more appropriate." The Swiss, Comtesse continued, seek to "protect against any state despotism.

This way of thinking has historical roots in Protestantism, which in Calvin's time sought to protect the people against the despotism of the powerful Catholic Church."

Financial privacy and religious freedom-including separation of church and state, another Calvinist specialty--went hand in hand. So, too, would prosperity. The lessons of Geneva were not lost on the founding generation in America, who created in their First and Fourth Amendments a zone of religious...