drmathias

In Britain for example, 64% of the population oppose raising income taxes and 84% oppose raising inheritance taxes. The only politically popular tax is a general wealth tax which has 77% in favour.

It is generally accepted a wealth tax will not directly meaningfully lower the deficit. There's also examples of those who would be affected spending massive sums of money lobbying against such taxes and threatening capital flight. These are generally the same group of people as political donors.

Studies also show 84% of people across the top 36 major countries believe wealth inequality is a problem in their country. This leads me to draw the conclusion that politically popular tax policy and wealth inequality are closely intertwined.

All these things considered, a political party evaluating the risk of policy changes on their polling would always pick the option of reducing spending.

Only of the government both simultaneously refuses to raise taxes and refuses to control spending. Because the central bank can choose to set the rate, as Japan did for decades.

Given the wealth distribution of the population has become so unequal, raising taxes for the purposes of lowering the deficit is a politically impossible option. So the only politically feasible option is controlling spending.

AML laws enforce monitoring so that legitimate businesses have to block or report activity, assisting law enforcement in tracing said criminal activity. It's the most effective way. As the famous saying goes: follow the money.

You're correct on the privacy implications. It's shocking how much data AML monitoring companies have collected about you, there's more data points than any single person could think up. These aren't entities owned by the government - they're private companies.

Also yes money laundering does not require cash but I think the author is highlighting the scale of it. Most countries tax consumption a.k.a VAT and 'hidden transactions' such as cash transactions bypass that.

You can be anti-anti-money-laundering but then you also either have to be a complete anarchist or completely anti-taxation and anti-data-collection by corporations and yet still have a reasonable argument for how this will result in the ability for society to have a government.

I'm not saying the system is perfect - far from any means. However the utopia you describe seems infeasible to me.