Comment by onetimeusename
3 days ago
Ending anonymous banking like in Switzerland was a major objective for the US. They said it was because it allowed money laundering for terrorists. People will get upset when the government talks about ending encryption in order to stop terrorism but the same concept applied to money apparently doesn't matter.
In practice we have a system where money laundering has not ended and we have much more financial surveillance for average citizens. That was probably the purpose all along and it never had anything to do with finding tax evaders or stopping terrorism.
> much more financial surveillance for average citizens
As with the TSA, any system designed to filter "bad guys" ends up being a huge imposition on average citizens, because there's a lot more of them.
I can see how TSA is an imposition on a large number of average citizens. The Internet is telling me that in recent years (except during COVID) about half of Americans flew in the past year [1], which would mean each year about half of Americans have to deal with the TSA.
But with money laundering and KYC I'm having trouble remembering ever having to deal with them. What are situations where the average citizen finds them an imposition?
I vaguely remember being asked what the sources were for the money in my IRAs, but don't remember who asked or what I was doing with them. Maybe it was during an application for a home equity line of credit? Anyway, whatever it was I just told them (rollover from a 401k, money from my salary, and earnings from investments held in the IRAs) and they didn't ask for any proof or anything.
[1] https://www.airlines.org/dataset/air-travelers-in-america-an...
> I vaguely remember being asked what the sources were for the money in my IRAs
That is the issue. Its none of their business where your money came from. The collected information will eventually be abused as evidenced most recently by Canada's trucker bank freezes.
Not in the states, but. Just yesterday I went to a Toyota dealership to take a look at a Yaris with my retiree mom. During the usual sales talk, the rep casually dropped that there’s an AML form that needs filling in if the sales go through.
For a fucking Toyota Yaris. Bought by a retiree. Who’s going to be paying it through the banking system where they already have KYC, AML, and all of her financial history.
If that’s not overreach, I don’t know what is. And… who elected the people who came up with this? (That’s a rhetorical question)
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We need far more of a willingness to "bite the bullet" and accept that sometimes bad things happen, and after a bad things happens we can simply go back to how we were doing things before.
We don't need to constantly change and often times collectively punish society for one bad terrorist attack.
That's the American response to mass shootings: ignore them and change nothing.
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What's the point of surveilling the movements of average citizens' money? They usually don't hide anyway. I suppose tax evaders were the target all along, with a smattering of criminal operators, e.g. drug dealers. Terrorists were but a pretext to produce moral panic.
You justify surveillance in the wake of terrorist attacks, etc. and when public sentiment toward government is mostly good (the financial surveillance here is an example)
You make moves to constrict the available information and permitted behavior of residents and citizens in excess of what is defined by law through pressure on culture and public marketplaces, etc. and not legal action by government. (e.g. the stuff going on with erotic content on Steam recently, but not limited to stuff like that). You start with more questionable and controversial things like e.g. sexually explicit content, then progress to all content or ideas that are inconvenient to your regime.
You boil the frog of authority over the public at a rate where only a minority starts noticing problems and looking for solutions in educating themselves using politically inconvenient media (and flagging themselves as enemies in the surveillance tools) or taking action that is inconvenient to you
You start making court cases against these inconvenient people and start deporting them or incarcerating them. First with e.g. illegal immigrants or foreign national students that are saying things that are unpopular, but slowly escalate to all the people that disagree with you.
If you don't think all these things are well established, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Yes. Sadly, 9/11 is the classic case of terrorists having won :(
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> What's the point of surveilling the movements of average citizens' money?
The most important is taxation. People pay their babysitters or gardeners under the table, or transact with friends and family without reporting income, and this is a huge amount of lost tax revenue.
Another reason are policy options. For one, there are certain decidedly "non-terrorist" goods and services that the government might not want you to purchase. Heck, in the era of ZIRP, many economists were seriously talking about negative interest rates. You can't do that if a person has the option of taking out cash and hiding it under the mattress.
> People pay their babysitters or gardeners under the table, or transact with friends and family without reporting income, and this is a huge amount of lost tax revenue.
Is it though? The entire bottom 50% of the population paid something like 3% of total federal income tax, by intentional design of the tax system. Babysitters don't owe any significant amount of taxes whether they report it or not and under some circumstances (e.g. EITC) their effective rate can even be negative. Forcing them to report the income can't seriously be the justification for all of this mass surveillance.
> Heck, in the era of ZIRP, many economists were seriously talking about negative interest rates. You can't do that if a person has the option of taking out cash and hiding it under the mattress.
That doesn't have anything to do with physical cash. You could do the same thing by borrowing at a negative rate and investing the money in any security/asset/commodity. Which is why negative interest rates are crazy and never really happened.
> People pay their babysitters or gardeners under the table, or transact with friends and family without reporting income, and this is a huge amount of lost tax revenue.
This money was already taxed when the individual who pays the babysitter received it. It's questionable whether the society as a whole benefits from taxing babysitters.
> Heck, in the era of ZIRP, many economists were seriously talking about negative interest rates. You can't do that if a person has the option of taking out cash and hiding it under the mattress.
I'm not sure you'll gain much support for bespoke policies like that. Just reading this passage made me feel an urge to hide some cash under the mattress.
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Yes lets tax these small transactions so that we can go back and give the tax cuts to the billionaire class.
I think that capitalism has strayed away from its original goal. We have basically parasites in the current ecosystem leeching off of either land rent or being billionaires imo.
But no it feels like we don't discuss it, we will all be ever so radicalized about something that happened on twitter etc. that we are forgetting the issue of classes.
Once again, Georgism/land value tax is the superior tax policy. Simpler enforcement.
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Unless you have a regular 9-5 job (bonus point if it's government), most small businesses and sole traders are evading taxes (not just optimizing). Also, your ability to increase taxes is tightly linked to your ability to collect it. So by surveying transactions, you are able to increase taxes.
Control
My point that authorities already exercised enough control over normal citizens anyway. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and never cared to have a bank account in Switzerland, let alone an anonymous bank account.
But the few certain Americans, and especially non-Americans, who did apparently bothered the US administration enough.
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If you can make private and uncensorable payments, you can pay an army.
The “only one army” concept is how governments remain governments.
If you could raise and pay a competing army, the state’s monopoly on “legitimate” violence becomes threatened.
This is why most states also heavily restrict private access to arms. Interestingly enough, it is also why the United States explicitly protected it: to specifically prepare for (and protect the right to) violent revolution.
> If you can make private and uncensorable payments, you can pay an army.
Just in case people thinks this is far fetched...
Several countries in latin america are actually narcostates disguised as democracies. The drug cartels make so much money they can afford to have their own military forces, not rarely trained by actual soldiers who deserted for better pay.
I live in one such country: Brazil. We have a couple massive organized crime gangs which dominate huge amounts of territory. They have their own governments, their own laws, their own tribunals, they even collect taxes from their subjects. They essentially pulled off a stealthy, undeclared secession.
I gotta admit I have a certain respect for these drug gangs... They are an example of the power afforded by real freedom. Instead of waiting for the government to solve their problems, they had the balls to arm themselves to the teeth and seize what they wanted, like it or not. They exercised the freedom to build a new system that benefits themselves to the detriment of the society that shunned them. That's the freedom governments cannot tolerate. The freedom to replace them.
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17% of the USA smokes weed (makes them a prohibited possessor), 8+% are felons, DV convictions are harder to find but incredibly common, 4+% of USA are immigrants who have no right to bear arms (illegal or non-immigrant visa).
So maybe 1/4 or more of the adult USA is explicitly barred from the right to bear arms. When you consider those same people would have been much of the ~3% that had high enough risk tolerance to fight the American revolution, basically the USA has barred a very large proportion of those with the risk taking temperament that would enable them to become part of the ~3%.
They've effectively made it illegal for revolution type of risk taker to have arms unless those risk takers used the police/military as that outlet. Note this is a relatively new development -- the M1 carbine was invented by a prisoner inside a prison!
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> it is also why the United States explicitly protected it: to specifically prepare for (and protect the right to) violent revolution.
How is the right to violent revolution prepared for and protected in the US?
You are forgetting the vast quantity of mercenaries that exists around the world. It is possible to build an army nowadays, drug dealers, and other groups can. They will not directly confront a country. Don't forget cybersecurity where relatively few people can attain a lot of power.
To be fair Switzerland really did (does?) help to launder a lot of money for terrorism.
very strong claims, any facts to back them up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_Switzerland#Connect...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_Switzerland#Banking...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/feb/21/tax-timeline-cr...
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They funded the Nazis with the help of the Catholic Church, did they not? Isn’t that a widely known fact? Or am I simply wrong?
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Don't forget tax cheats.
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