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Comment by JulianMorrison | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, money laundering is not harmless. Two ways:

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.

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So instead of taking down human traffickers pimping people who are essentially slaves, we should be going after the ones who aren't smart enough to hire a great accountant?

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

I can't help but feel that you didn't fully understand what the grandparent post said, so let me take a whack at it:

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.

I do understand that nation.

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.

That's why we should be able to support roads locally (via service, toll) without having to hope government takes care of it via extortion (erm. I mean tax). Same with parks, education etc.

So get rid of all the rural areas and let's all move to the city? That's the only way your plan is feasible.

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.

> I can't even imagine ...

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

Is that the wiki page that computer language designers link to when compiler developers complain that they have no clue how a pet feature would actually be implemented?

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.

I used to think that way. But I updated my ideas once and for all when I improved my understanding of consent.

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.

There is a strain of libertarian contract theory that (while perhaps still problematic on feminist grounds in its likely implications) is more compatible with the idea of enthusiastic consent.

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.

And I used to think the way you do. But I did some simple, back-of-the-envelope calculations and basic research, I came to the conclusion that our government is primarily paid for by the middle and upper-middle classes. The top 1% pay virtually no taxes on their vast wealth. Remember Mitt Romney's returns? Well, that's entirely typical. And how is this so? It's because the top 1% -- really the top 0.1% -- own the government. It does whatever they want. And they don't want to pay taxes, so they put that responsibility on the shoulders on the already-struggling middle class. So in case it's not obvious, anything we do now to increase the federal government's powers increases the power at the hands of the 0.1% wealthiest. This country is being distracted by this silly liberal/libertarian and left/right debate when in truth the problem is both big government and big business. So the question becomes, how do we fix the problem? There are no easy answers, but the idea that allowing the federal government to increase its every-expanding powers will lead to increased equality is a dangerous siren call.

> [...] "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), [...]

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.

There are a great many people who benefit from roads indirectly via the services and commerce they provide.

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.

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