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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> Somehow somewhere along the way we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime. That to me should have been a clear step in the wrong direction.

Totally wrong direction.

> "Money laundering" (however that is defined) should not be a crime. Theft, fraud, etc. should be.

This goes back to this weird fetishism where people think it was oh-so-cool to arrest and convict Al Capone for "not paying taxes" instead of convicting him for his actual crimes.

A society which thinks its cool to send people to jail for tax evasion instead of sending them to jail for organized crime is a failed society.

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Prohibition-era USA was, if not failed, at least a failing society. There was by this point pretty widespread public corruption and general lack of respect for the law.

Anyway, wasn't the tax evasion also an actual crime? It's not like you get a pass on the tax evasion because you're also strongly suspected of committing much worse crimes, is it?

> It's not like you get a pass on the tax evasion because you're also strongly suspected of committing much worse crimes, is it?

Tax evasion is what did Al Capone in. Because the bar to prove that he was involved in a lot of seriously criminal activity was quite high, but proving that he committed tax only required proving that he had undeclared income.

This society sends people to jail for tax evasion all the time, even if the original source of their income was non-criminal.

Al Capone was guilty of running a massive criminal organisation responsible for many many crimes (very difficult to prove due to structures of organised crime). He was also guilty of massive tax evasion (a crime carrying serious jail time), because it turns out it's hard to pay the right tax bill when you're trying to hide the income from your massive criminal enterprise.

The Capone tax case wasn't some made up crime to try pin him. He committed serious tax evasion, which would also carry severe penalties if you or I did it at that scale with legitimate income.

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