You're getting downvoted but you're right. Ideally, we'd live in a world where highly sophisticated multinational cartel like entities don't regularly abuse markets to launder their ill gotten gains and finance their operations.
Perhaps your downvoters (and mine too) in this thread would like to argue that it's a slippery slope akin to surveillance to accept AML laws which a priori purport to protect us from the effects of these crimes while only taking freedom further away and creating more space for despotic selective enforcement. I'm sympathetic to this argument, but only to a point. Another side to this argument is that AML laws should be resisted not just because they are right or wrong, but because they are ineffective.
My problem is while I may have sympathies to these ideas in theory, in practice, proactively addressing, enforcing and prosecuting money laundering is something just about every government has a vested interest in doing because governments fund themselves through taxation. I can understand the desire to limit government AML overstep and surveillance, but wouldn't that simply mean that we leave AML enforcement and surveillance to the private markets? Would it mean we somehow reform society so there would be no nee for money laundering in the first place because we've eradicated criminal enterprise in the first place?
I'll be the first to admit I don't have an answer for you. I'd say I wonder if the downvoters do, but I think we both know the answer to that.
My thoughts on the matter is that the US and other governments deputized financial intermediaries to perform surveillance and pre-emptive enforcement.
This is merely a convenience they’ve gotten in a coincidental electronic transfer system that required those intermediaries. They didnt have it before and they wont have it after. These governments have not been granted any additional rights over money flows and as the intermediaries become unnecessary, it will be prudent for them to remember bot to waste public resources grasping for the convenience of warrantless surveillance. Their ability to implement seamless automated anti money laundering procedures and enforcement evaporates, and they would be better off unburdening people now instead of trying to push for a right they never actually had. They’ll have to create new tools to deter and prosecute whatever behavior they are actually trying to stop.
Perhaps your downvoters (and mine too) in this thread would like to argue that it's a slippery slope akin to surveillance to accept AML laws which a priori purport to protect us from the effects of these crimes while only taking freedom further away and creating more space for despotic selective enforcement. I'm sympathetic to this argument, but only to a point. Another side to this argument is that AML laws should be resisted not just because they are right or wrong, but because they are ineffective.
My problem is while I may have sympathies to these ideas in theory, in practice, proactively addressing, enforcing and prosecuting money laundering is something just about every government has a vested interest in doing because governments fund themselves through taxation. I can understand the desire to limit government AML overstep and surveillance, but wouldn't that simply mean that we leave AML enforcement and surveillance to the private markets? Would it mean we somehow reform society so there would be no nee for money laundering in the first place because we've eradicated criminal enterprise in the first place?
I'll be the first to admit I don't have an answer for you. I'd say I wonder if the downvoters do, but I think we both know the answer to that.