Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

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> modestly large transactions.

This is for transactions over 10k. That's not "moderately large". The only time most people make transactions that size is for buying a house, car or life insurance. Those are not transactions that normal people do in cash, and all of them already require significant paperwork anyway.

> All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.

Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone.

I strongly support the right to privacy, but I'm not naive about the need to fight money laundering or collect taxes.

you're presupposing that your experience of cash transactions is and should be everyone's experience of cash transactions. Yes, many normal people sometimes conduct business with larger amounts of cash over 10k euros, which by the way isn't all that much anymore. And even if this is unusual, banning the unusual is a terrible way to run laws. If you defend financial privacy, I can't see how you could defend such an idiotic and intrusive law.

>Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone.

No, it's a way of defending the basic idea that the state's right to squeeze every penny and justify any law in the name of being able to do so shouldn't be automatically unquestioned. You saying that this cash amount represents a significant piece of income for someone takes as given that the cash in question is being laundered or used for evasion. Do you really believe that this should be a default assumption, or that it's right for the government to assume such guilt just because money is present in someone's daily business? Imagine if all legal issues were handled in such a disgusting way. For some reason, too many people put on emotional blinders and with tax law, ignore how barbarically stupid that is if any respect for presumptions of innocence exists.

You are certainly naive about how reliable government is about being able to pry into everything financial, or how absolute should be its right to squeeze for any amount of money.

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