Comment by AnthonyMouse
2 days ago
This doesn't really have anything to do with "money laundering". For example, you get the same set of problems if the money is accumulating to monopolies or industries with artificial scarcity as a result of regulatory capture even though the law doesn't require them to "launder" the money they're accumulating.
Meanwhile in the case of classical criminal enterprises, the laws against money laundering don't actually work because in practice there are ten thousand ways to exchange value other than with official currency. And then the systems to prevent "money laundering" cause more problems for honest people who get trapped up in them out of ignorance, or become victims of corrupt government officials who use financial surveillance systems for oppression, whereas professional criminal organizations just restructure their activities to bypass the rules.
All of the other items you mentioned are things that society attempts to regulate against as well. And while there are an infinite number of ways to exchange value it stays between those involved. If the drug dealer is happy to trade heroin for house painting the damage is self limiting.
Once it’s converted to money it’s everyone’s problem. I can’t avoid my mortgage interest helping supporting the dealer who is supplying the addicts who are stealing my stuff. The harder I work, the worse it gets.
The controls may not be effective but I think they are necessary. I wouldn’t want to live in most countries where money laundering dominates financial activity.
> All of the other items you mentioned are things that society attempts to regulate against as well.
Which is exactly the point. The proceeds from both market monopolization and contract killings are the proceeds of a crime, but the proper way to address this is to impose penalties for the antitrust violation or murder rather than tracking the finances of millions of innocent people only to fail to prevent the criminals from successfully laundering the money of the un-prosecuted original crime regardless.
If you're prosecuting the original crime, you don't need laws against money laundering. If you're not prosecuting the original crime you're already screwed and need to fix that.
> If the drug dealer is happy to trade heroin for house painting the damage is self limiting.
It's quite the opposite. The drug dealer doesn't want their house painted by a heroin addict, they want money. But by definition money is fungible. Anybody can buy or sell whatever.
Now let's suppose the heroin addict has a choice between taking a job to buy heroin and stealing the copper pipes out of your house to buy heroin, and these things are equally annoying. It's hard to hold a job as an addict but it's also hard to steal things because it's dangerous and illegal, so to begin with it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. But the drug dealer wants money, not copper pipes, so the first one has an edge.
Then you pass a law against money laundering. Well, now the drug dealer wants copper pipes, or wire, or anything else that can be pawned, because he can take them to the scrap yard or pawn shop himself, claim he found them in an old shed or had them left over after a renovation etc., or even set up a fake construction company in order to do that at scale, and then get a receipt from the scrap yard legitimizing the cash he gets from selling your pipes that the addict stole to get drugs. Is this new arrangement helping you or hurting you?
If all the drug cartels in the world were limited to pawning copper scrap it would make me very happy indeed. I am also sure that it would benefit a large number of people who live in countries where cartel money dominates the economy.
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Money laundering is just illegal.
There are definitely legal ways too that screws you over in this financial world.
You say that you wouldn't want to live in a world where money laundering dominates financial activity? Well how about a world where cryptocoins/multi level marketing/ai stickers/private equity parasites/land owners (almost parasites?) /billionaires dominates the financial activity??
I guess you or many others live in such a system. I am not even talking about United states, I feel like to a lot of countries, the same thing is true.
I wouldn’t want to live in a world where the equivalent of the life’s work of its average citizen are traded causally like chips on a poker table and the only option to opt-out is to barter or starve. It would be hard to see the difference between that and feudalism.