alt Hacker News> Money laundering is an absurd concept. People should be free to transfer money to whoever they like, without permission.
They got Al Capone for tax evasion, not any of the other obviously illegal stuff he was doing. I don't know the details, but I imagine it was because he put in effort to create an organization that made it difficult-to-impossible for the law-abiding feds to go after him directly. That's why it's important to also prohibit the ancillary activities of crime.
And money laundering isn't an absurd concept, it just means it's additionally illegal to conceal the origin of illicit income.
If you want to get all dogmatic against stuff like laws against money laundering, come up with an effective alternative. Otherwise those laws aren't going anywhere and few will care about your objections, because they're unreasonable.
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Obvious solution is to make soft drugs like fentanyl fully legal. Just apply sufficient purity to standards as regulation like with any other drug. Issue solved instantly. It is not like other deathly drugs aren't already legal.
> come up with an effective alternative
I already did, and noted it in my parent comment if you actually read it. The alternative is crypto. It works. To use your own words back at you, no one who needs to transmit money freely will care about your silly objections, because they're unreasonable.
If money laundering is not absurd, then electricity laundering for the purpose of a crime must similarly not be absurd. Everyone must be required to provide documentation of their electricity usage and spikes. After all it could be used to conduct a crime, and we can lower crime by having laws against electricity laundering. /s
In truth, many little brains that I am interacting with here seem to be having trouble with letting abstractions be abstractions. A society can be at rest only when it doesn't have to think twice about its abstractions, otherwise it will never know peace. The same people also can't rewind to see how foolish the war on drugs is in the first place.
> If you want to get all dogmatic against stuff like laws against money laundering, come up with an effective alternative
No, it's not just a matter of alternatives: it is also a matter of principles.
For example: in europe, I am unable to make online purchases with electronic money, as all the payment devices are tracked, matched with a personal identity - they cannot be unidentified as they could be only a few years ago. There existed occasional cards for online shopping - now they ask you a local telephone number, identity tied. This under the excuse of "countering money laundering". So there you have "privacy" vs "financial monitoring" - with immensely disproportionate effects in a farcical manouvre.