I don't see the problem. Living in a free world is dangerous, and undesirable things (might) happen. But how is it justified to restrict the freedom of one individual, because of something somebody else did (or worse, might do)?

Money laundering is just a sequence of voluntary transactions between consenting individuals. No reason that should be illegal and there's no reason the government needs to be able to trace every financial transaction back to its source.

Organized crime? Feh... government (or what passes for government these days) is organized crime.

I don't know about others, but I find it very difficult to get upset about a crime that's new, that doesn't impact me, and that the world got along just fine with for centuries.

(Of course that doesn't mean that I support crime in general. I'm just taking a side: the social benefit to money-laundering laws is not as much as the social downside, at least in 2013. In 1995 I might have easily weighed it the other way)

You have to ask yourself a serious question: are these laws being used to protect us from crime? Or are they being used to protect the financial system itself from us?

Money laundering is an interesting crime in that a series of otherwise legal transactions may be considered laundering if the source of the funds was tainted in the eyes of prosecutor in any of several ways. Most usually by being the result of an enterprise that is criminal in nature; such as attempting to avoid taxes...

So as with many financial crimes these days; the criminality is entirely dependent on the political power of the accused. An Apple or Google is not committing money laundering by structuring their transactions to avoid having their revenue streams being tainted with taxability. But if you or I were to try such a thing...

1. It permits crime to pay. Yes, drugs ought to be legal, but "crime" also includes other stuff that has a victim, such as theft, extortion, fraud, fake products, misappropriation of funds, forced prostitution, etc.

2. It behaves like economic globalization, to the n'th degree. Don't like your local tax regime? Pick one, with the click of a mouse. Right now big business gets expensive tax lawyers to set them up schemes where they are nominally doing business somewhere else, but you can bet their expensive tax lawyers are eyeing bitcoin with interest. So what if the roads locally have potholes and the school got sold off?

As to why it's a new issue, that's just down to technology. It didn't used to be feasible, except by gold-smuggling or the suchlike. That has changed.

It's be real here. Smugglers and criminals have been around for eons, and motivated police forces have been able to control them.

First, human trafficking is illegal, but (apparently) very profitable. It was an unstated assumption that those people who engage in these sorts of activities do so primarily out of a motive for profit. In other words, that human trafficking could be largely eliminated by making it unprofitable.

In order for traffickers to enjoy the considerable fruits of their (slaves') labors, they need to invent a plausible-seeming and, more importantly, legal source for their wealth. This is called money-laundering. To do otherwise would invite the attention of the local constabulary.

What the GP is suggesting is that a viable means to curtailing human trafficking is to make money laundering difficult. This makes it difficult to use the profits of the crime, which reduces the incentive to commit the crime in the first place.

Money laundering laws have been around for quite some time now. Last time I checked, there are plenty of drug dealers and pimps operating.

I'd argue that the supply-side is probably a more productive place to attack these problems. Make it unprofitable to enslave someone vs. hire someone.

Libertarian anarchist theory is based on non-aggression, that is, the idea that capitalism can be a system where people deal only by consent. But the kind of consent it uses is "affirmative consent" - you said "yes", or you signed a contract agreeing ahead of time.

Feminism introduced me to the stricter idea of "enthusiastic consent" - you ongoingly and genuinely want to. From this improved perspective, contract is unacceptable (it's there to allow you to be forced despite no longer wanting to), and putting someone in an arm twisted position of "say yes or starve" is clearly not consensual. But this is precisely what capitalism does.

Honestly as things are now, I don't agree with the existence of money systems at all. I am not pro-tax, I'm against the whole of the money/paying/salary/finance system in its entirety. But tax is a weak hack to at least claw back a little economic equality. And breaking it without replacing it is harmful.

As to "we should be able to support roads" (or whatever), basically this has the same power and limitation as crowdfunding. A million ordinary people can scrape up a million dollars between them. But most of the economic power has already been sucked out of their reach - any individual in the 1% could pay that $1m out of their personal fortune and not even feel it. Spreading effort over the many when the few hold all the resources is a strategy doomed to fail.

Rothbard's position was that the only proper subject of an enforceable contract was the transfer of title to alienable property. Therefore, the only permissible use of force to compel specific performance would be to compel title transfer. A slavery contract, under this theory, is unenforceable because one's self and one's labor are not alienable.

This breaks down around edge cases relating to alienable property strictly necessary for life, though there's a case to be made that any property strictly necessary for life isn't alienable. That's a hole big enough to drive a system of socialized medicine through.

It is a very important right to be able to bind yourself via contract. In exactly the same way as is the _right_ of getting sued. Tom Schelling wrote about these issues in e.g. The Strategy of Conflict.

The right to commit yourself is important, because it will make other people more likely to commit themselves to you.

I can't even imagine how school would have worked for me that year I lived on my grandparent's farm without the whole school district having to pitch in.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

As it stands what you've done is attacked the logic of the argument, as opposed to giving so much as a weak suggestion of how the problem would actually be solved.

Not all market transaction systems are effective at capturing sufficient amounts of consumer surplus to make provision of services possible.

As another example: many private (and public) transit systems were funded and financed by retail and real estate interests. By covering the fixed capital and much of the operating expenses of bus, trolley, and rail lines, they increased demand for their products and services. You see this today, but it comes in the form of providing "free parking" for retail establishments (you think those acres of parking outside your local mall or WalMart don't cost anything?).

Markets have failures too, my friend.

I agree that we should do away with all new laws that don't directly affect DanielBMarkham.

A great example is the State Senator Joe Bruno case in NY. The Senator was the majority leader of the Senste for many years, an institution that is synonymous with corruption. (At least a dozen members are currently either under indictment or named as the subject of an investigation by the US Attorney.)

The Federal case was essentially that Bruno took bribes, except they couldn't prove it. So they prosecuted him for violation of what i call a meta-law... the so-called "honest services" laws, key parts of which were deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. So now they are going after him again for bribery -- a case that is probably double jeopardy and is subject to all sorts of appeals, essentially for the purpose of bankrupting the guy.

Acts that potentially support a crime should not be criminal acts. Go convict the money launderer of tax evasion, racketeering or drug sales. Go convict a criminal without the resources for an attorney for whatever they did, not for lying to an agent of the US.

society (seems to) believe that the presence of organized criminal organizations is negative and leads to violence. so how do we fight them? do we lock people up when they pull a trigger? but there are so many people who would pull a trigger and none of them are the people near the top of the food chain. how do you arrest those responsible for and profiting from violent criminal syndicates?

if you follow this train of reasoning long enough you get to criminalizing some financial behavior.

Money laundering has been illegal since basically Roman times, however until it was called out explicitly as a crime it was generally charged and prosecuted as abetting after the fact.

There are lots of ways you could be charged with abetting criminals, from providing shelter and new clothes when they were on the run (harboring a fugitive) to providing false information or failing to cooperate (obstruction of justice) and it has always been a challenge to decide just how far outside the influence ring of a particular crime you can prosecute.

It is an interesting look at market dynamics. And while the 'outer layers' of the criminal enterprise were not being prosecuted it created a weird sort of bubble market where crooks living on the margin could promote suckers to be the 'kingpin' and enrich themselves on things like supplying guns, or laundering profits, or providing transportation, and the kingpin gets caught and sent to jail, these folks need a new kingpin to keep the engine going.

In prosecuting so called 'organized crime' in the late 60's and 70's law enforcement realized that they couldn't just put away the boss. The theory that crime was lead by a small number of people who tricked a much larger number of people into facilitating that crime, turned out to be quite wrong. There were large numbers of people who knew what they were doing to support the criminal enterprise was wrong, they just didn't care because they were earning a living and were unlikely to be prosecuted. So we saw a shift to more systemic prosecution of the entire food chain, and the specific actions which supported criminal activity were called out. The RICO Act is probably the key bit of legislation which reflected that shift. I was living in Las Vegas in the early 70's and that was on the tail end of the authorities trying to 'clean up' that town. Their effort focused on cleaning up the infrastructure (like the mob controlled unions) in addition to the crooks themselves.

But this is something you really need to think hard about:

"I don't know about others, but I find it very difficult to get upset about a crime that's new, that doesn't impact me, and that the world got along just fine with for centuries."

It does effect you, that viagra spam you get? Those Oxycodone and Adderal pills you kids are being offered at school, the insurance rates on your car, the price you pay for things at the store, Etc. We live in a world where some folks take millions of dollars from a wide variety of people. That activity causes your fees to go up which is how the money is transferred from your pocket into the criminals pockets. The carders steal a million dollars from Amazon by using fake credit cards, and Amazon increases their transaction fee for everyone using credit cards to offset that loss, your money goes to the criminals. Sometimes they kill the store/restaurant/company but if the customer base is large enough they just leech off the customers. It is much closer to being a zero sum game than you realize. And when they defraud the federal government they recover that money by getting more tax money.

The key here is that it isn't a "new" crime, its the support of criminal activity which has gone on forever. Making it difficult to profit from crime has been a very potent force in reducing crime in general.

It's even worse than zero-sum. Those actions effectively act as a tax that prevents even more business than they leech off.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=money+launderin...

A brief modern history: http://www.fincen.gov/news_room/aml_history.html

Posing this question suggests you've already arrived at the answer ("yes").

You seriously think there was no money laundering going on in the 1970's??

The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 actually sought to combat money laundering by the Mafia and the early cocaine cartels (didn't you ever see Scarface?). Although many banks didn't abide by these laws, there were subsequent laws to combat money laundering such as:

Money Laundering Control Act (1986) Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1988) Annunzio-Wylie Anti-Money Laundering Act (1992)

The Money Secrecy Act has actually been amended several times and is now part of the patriot act:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act

Money laundering is almost as old as prostitution.

>"Money laundering" is a very recent crime

Sure, it's been around for a long time, but only in the last 40 years has it been illegal in the US. I'd like to see how many of these criminal organizations have been taken down by money laundering laws as opposed to tax fraud or something else. You can be sure that, even though it's illegal, most criminals are still able to launder their money.

We've outsourced our personal and financial security to large and unresponsive governments; on net we are more rather than less victimized by criminals. The only difference is that these criminals wear suits and have names like Draghi and Bernanke.