Comment by bradley13

> 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)

That's the American response to mass shootings: ignore them and change nothing.

Yes. Sadly, 9/11 is the classic case of terrorists having won :(

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

> 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.

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...

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?

> If you pay income taxes you get a vote.

Why?

I’m not allowed to vote medicine FDA approvals because I’m not a doctor.

Why are some topics “restricted” to the experts? But voting for president is not?

> 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?

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.

Related but entirely different purposes. Paying taxes on illegally sourced money is basically the goal, because it makes it legal - it gives you a declared income and means future transactions look within your means.

Tax evasion conversely makes legally earned money somewhat illegal to the evader (though generally fine for anyone else to handle accidentally).