What it lacks is any concrete suggestion as to what should change, beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback.
The real problem here though is that the entire article ignores the duty[1] the government owes its citizens.
It's "fine"[2] if stripe or visa or whoever flips a coin and if it's tails they decide this person isn't allowed to be a customer of their company. The company loses any profit they might have made and life goes on.
It's considerably more problematic when the government refuses to serve a citizen (or even worse, levies an accusation).
There's some famous quotes about how many innocent people are appropriate to harm in the pursuit of the guilty but I'll leave those up to the reader.
[1] duty feels like too weak of a word here. Obligation? Requirement? The only reason the government even exists is to benefit the citizens.
[2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic...
The reason why risk departments all inevitably reinvent Maoism is because the only effective enforcement mechanism they have is to refuse service. Fraudsters are fundamentally illegible to businesses of this size. And as the article stated, recidivism rates in fraud are high enough that someone caught doing fraud should never be given the time of day ever again. So the easiest strategy is to pick some heuristics that catch recidivist fraudsters and keep them a jealously guarded secret.
This calculus falls apart for the government. If someone rips the government off, they can arrest them, compel the production of documents from every third party they've interacted with, and throw them in jail where they won't be able to rip anyone else off for decades. Obviously, if we gave the Risk Department Maoists these same permissions, we'd be living under tyranny.
Well, more tyranny than we already live under.
But at the same time, the fact that we have these legal powers makes Risk Maoism largely obsolete. We don't need to repeatedly reinvestigate the same people for the same crime "just in case".
It’s just like… why?! I can’t wrap my head around it. There’s no downside to being able to top off on milk and eggs by taking a leisurely stroll on a sunny Saturday morning. That sounds downright idyllic.
People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away.
The thing to note is that NIMBYs are loud and obnoxious, but they do not have broad democratic support. What the average person has is a deep aversion to change they were not consulted with. What gives NIMBYs power is the fact that the average zoning agency is not very good at explaining the rationale of their changes or collecting and incorporating public feedback. It's very easy for a NIMBY to take a few things out of context, bring out a parade of horribles, and scare the average guy into opposing something they otherwise might have liked.
Since NIMBYs are inherently minoritarian, the real base of their power isn't even democratic outrage. Their favored tool to stop projects they don't like is paper terrorism: i.e. finding as many legal complaints as possible that they can sue over to block the project. Even if they're bullshit, it'll take a year or two to get the lawsuit thrown out. Which means that, congratulations, you just increased the cost of the project by about 10% or so, and you're probably gonna have to explain to the feds why the grants you applied for aren't enough and your project is late.
[0] And, in the process, piss off a bunch of locals as they bumble their way through the city using their translator app
[1] In fact, a lot of the hype surrounding self-driving cars is just to make it possible to completely shut off one's brain while driving. I would argue that trains and buses already do that, but...