Anti-Money Laundering laws are a complete anti-democratic tyranny. With AML you are assumed guilty anytime you possess money, or participate in any financial transactions, or have any assets. If called upon to do so you will have to prove your innocence beyond a reasonable doubt, and if you fail to do so, your assets or money can be permanently seized. All of this occurs without any form of due process.
The government actually wouldn’t be able to make these regulations for itself, and the only way it manages to make AML laws work is with a complete governance anti-pattern. Where they simply tell the banks that if they unknowingly allow any “money laundering”, then they will be punished, rather than actually creating some regulations for them to follow. So the institutions just create these kafkaesque nightmares themselves, because they don’t really care about who gets screwed over by them.
The worse part is that money laundering is trivially easy for anybody who wants to do it, it just costs money to do the compliance properly. The only people who get thwarted by these laws are immigrants who do a lot of remittance, and law-abiding wealthy people who naively think they’re entitled to possess their own money. Two groups that society generally doesn’t care at all about protecting.
I personally make a lot of money off the AML compliance industry, so I’m not really complaining for my own sake. But these laws are the intended outcome of “anti-terrorism” and “anti-tax-evasion” policies.
> Anti-Money Laundering laws are a complete anti-democratic tyranny.
But they were produced through the democratic process: we have told our elected representatives that we want them to Do Something about things like organized crime and international terrorism, and these laws are part of the Something That Was Done. The laws will not change unless and until we the people change the incentives we give our elected representatives.
Wether or not laws and policies have, in practice, anything to do with what people want, is still up for debate [1] [2].
It could also be argued that such laws and policies have mainly been enacted by states in order to eliminate threats to their authority, legitimacy, or continued existence, through financial control.
Which may or may not be the case. Just pointing out that states, even liberal democracies, may not always be all about expressing the will of their constituents.
> Wether or not laws and policies have, in practice, anything to do with what people want, is still up for debate
If we the people wanted something different, we would be voting differently. The fact that we continue to vote for the same incumbents means they are doing what we want.
See gerrymandering. See abstention rates and voter apathy.
Politics, like any system, can be gamed. Considering the incentives and interests at play, it is no surprise that it is. Taking into account how long these systems or similar have been in place, it shouldn’t be surprising that efficient tactics and strategies have been devised and refined over time.
Also considering how uneducated most of us are when it comes to politics, it is no surprise that most of us fall continuously fall for age old tactics and strategies.
Regarding "we the people", I personally do not come from nor live in the US. In the country I come from, people chose to do exactly what you suggest and vote for someone new. They eschewed both traditional parties, did not fall into the extremes' traps, and elected… the underdog!
Or so they thought. It seems they hate him now. He did get reelected, but by less than 40% of the people who could vote if they cared to or believed it would change anything.
Nothing new under the sun, really. I’m pretty sure we’d find the same patterns at play in Athen’s Boule and Ancient Rome.
But hey, "with every mistake we must surely be learning".
In case it wasn’t clear, I have personally entirely given up on both my fellow citizens and my home country’s (a liberal democracy as well) politics.
Individual House Representatives usually have high approval ratings from people who voted them in while Congress as a whole has a terrible approval rating. It's not quite as simple as seeing historical election results and saying everybody is necessarily happy with their representation.
> Individual House Representatives usually have high approval ratings from people who voted them in while Congress as a whole has a terrible approval rating.
Yes, that's true. (And the Senate is no different.) What does it mean?
I think it means that people do not realize the actual problem. They don't see the two facts you cite as at odds with each other or connected to each other at all. But they are. The reason why Congress can have such a low approval rating while incumbency reelection rates remain high are that people think it's all those other members of Congress who are the problem--if only everyone would listen to their members of Congress, all that stuff would get fixed. They don't realize that, if you send someone to Congress to fix something, and it doesn't get fixed, you need to send someone else. You can't keep allowing the incumbents to hide behind "it's not me, it's all those others" forever.
>> Individual House Representatives usually have high approval ratings from people who voted them in while Congress as a whole has a terrible approval rating.
> Yes, that's true. (And the Senate is no different.) What does it mean?
Red voters tend to live in red seats & states, blue voters tend to live in blue seats and states.
I still think it's the most intuitive way to describe the first-order explanation for why people are happy with their specific representatives, but not Congress as a whole.
Just a reminder- modern democracies are a set of democratic institutions such as civil service, independent courts, free media, and some elected representatives. Rule by the people has not meant democracy for over a hundred years.
> There's no evidence that representatives do what constituents want them to do.
Sure there is. "Want them to do" means the constituents decide their votes based on Something Being Done. The fact that we the people continue to vote in our incumbent representatives at rates over 90 percent is a direct measure of the extent to which those representatives are doing what we want them to do.
No, that doesn't measure that they are doing what we want them to do. That measures how effectively they can convince us that the other candidate would be worse, so you should vote for the lesser evil.
On most topics, there is NO candidate who is for doing things outside of the current Overton window. If, for example, you don't like our AML laws, you probably don't have a viable candidate on the ballot who wants to change our AML laws. Therefore your vote can't show your support for changing AML laws.
> On most topics, there is NO candidate who is for doing things outside of the current Overton window.
Sure there is.
They aren't likely to be a major party candidate, but then, that's pretty much true by the definition of the Overton window -- if it is supported enough to be a tolerable position for a major party candidate that isn't an extreme outlier within the party, then it is not outside the range of acceptability than the Overton Window refers to.
(Of course, the major point of the Overton Window is that, in a system with elected lawmakers, laws largely aren't set by lawmakers preferences, but by forces, largely external to lawmakers -- including both concentrated interest groups and grassroots activists -- that shift the Overton Window and set the bounds for what it is practical for lawmakers to support.)
> that doesn't measure that they are doing what we want them to do. That measures how effectively they can convince us that the other candidate would be worse
If we are convinced, then they are doing what we want them to do--because they convinced us that there is no point in wanting anything else.
> On most topics, there is NO candidate who is for doing things outside of the current Overton window.
Yes, but what is the Overton window? It's the range of policies that most people will accept. So by definition only policies within the Overton window can possibly be what the people (or at least a majority of us) want.
> The fact that we the people continue to vote in our incumbent representatives at rates over 90 percent is a direct measure of the extent to which those representatives are doing what we want them to do.
This is an artifact of the districting system. A given district wants the local military base to stay open, or tax credits for the local industry. Their representative gets them that, so they get reelected. To get them that they screw over the general public in a thousand ways -- mostly by trading other representatives for the things that aren't in the public interest but their districts want -- but none of them are big enough for the people in the district to change their vote, and most of them couldn't have been prevented by a single representative anyway. So the bums fail to get voted out.
Which in no way contradicts what I said. The fact that what the people want (or at least a voting majority of us) actually screws over the general public does not mean the people don't want it. It just means that what the people want is not actually good for all of us in the long run. Welcome to reality.
You implied that the majority of voters want Something To Be Done and so keep reelecting the people who do this. In fact what happens is that the majority of voters don't even know that this issue exists, but some interest group wants it and captures a representative whose district isn't going to notice or care what their representative is doing on this and then trades votes on other issues their district also doesn't care about to get what they want from other representatives.
There are existing laws that couldn't command majority support in any district much less a majority of them but remain on the books because the representatives who support them continue to be reeelected for independent reasons.
The fact that people given a choice between "abortion is illegal" or "poors don't starve to death" choose "abortion is illegal" doesn't mean they want poors to starve to death (although they do want that); it just means they want abortion to be illegal more.
Okay, it was a bad example because those kinds of hardliners do want all the bad things to happen. People given a choice between "close the military base and lose your jobs" and "keep your jobs, but we drop more bombs on brown people" don't necessarily want to drop more bombs on brown people, but they do want to keep their jobs.
> given a choice between "abortion is illegal" or "poors don't starve to death"
What are you talking about? No voter is faced with that choice.
> those kinds of hardliners do want all the bad things to happen
Who are these "hardliners" you speak of?
> People given a choice between "close the military base and lose your jobs" and "keep your jobs, but we drop more bombs on brown people"
No voter is faced with that choice either. Closing the military base in a particular district doesn't mean the military downsizes. It just means the base gets built in some other district whose representatives were better at getting pork for their constituents.
None of these things have anything to do with the basic problem I described.
Mostly we vote based on our personal biggest issue, no matter what they do on the other issues. A lot of Republicans vote Republican because they claim to hate abortion, and they literally don't care about the rest.
I really hope this is a joke lol. The amount of paperwork required today is far in excess of anything required pre-GFC. Basically any wealth acquired prior to then is up for confiscation, and this happens all the time. But again, nobody cares, because injustices delivered upon the rich are fine. Imagine you inherited a property from your parents, how do you imagine you’d be able to prove the provenance of that asset? Or the cash used to buy it/pay the mortgage on it? You can’t.
>Imagine you inherited a property from your parents, how do you imagine you’d be able to prove the provenance of that asset? Or the cash used to buy it/pay the mortgage on it? You can’t.
Do you have an example of what you mean by this? Like they will say "well you don't have your old paper pay stubs from the 1990s when you were paying the mortgage on your house so we will confiscate your house, go die alone in the gutter"? Because I find that hard to believe. Most people with wealth have an obvious reason for that wealth which is documented in the formal bureaucratic system.
> well you don't have your old paper pay stubs from the 1990s when you were paying the mortgage on your house so we will confiscate your house
Yes this is basically how it works. The only contrived thing about my example is that we’re talking about one house a person inherited, rather than millions of dollars in assets.
Here’s a well documented example of this happening in real life
> A federal judge ruled Friday that the FBI’s seizure of tens of millions of dollars in cash and valuables from 700 safe-deposit boxes in Beverly Hills did not violate anyone’s constitutional rights.
> The decision by U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner endorsed law-enforcement tactics that tested the limits of how aggressive federal agents can be in seizing money and property in the absence of any evidence that the owner committed a crime.
> The ruling did not address some of the most controversial aspects of the raid, such as the FBI’s attempt to confiscate assets from box holders on the presumption they were criminals, even in cases where agents had no evidence to validate their suspicions.
Of course, nobody cares, because those people are rich, so they probably didn’t deserve that money anyway…
“The government seized the nests of safety deposit boxes because there was overwhelming evidence that [the deposit box storage location] was a criminal business that conspired with its criminal clients to distribute drugs, launder money, and structure transactions to avoid currency reporting requirements, among other offenses,” they said in papers filed in Los Angeles federal court.
Personally I don’t think there is any “to be fair” interpretation of the government making a presumption of guilt and placing the burden onto members of the public to prove their own innocence.
I assure you, rich people care very deeply about having their money taken away, and are, as a class, incredibly litigious, and are often politically connected.
I am not very impressed by implications that of the truly downtrodden and powerless people in the United States, the 'rich' are anywhere near the front of that line.
If you inherited it (at least in the US) there will be probate records. And property transfer records. There's LOTS of documentation for that sort of thing.
Records that you inherited it are not enough. Where are the records that your parents acquired it properly? Where are the records that prove the money they used to acquire the house were acquired properly? This is the trouble with a presumption of guilt, proving these things are basically impossible.
No. Probate records that you inherited it are enough to get property transferred to your name and the title recorded as such. If you want to be covered just in case your parents somehow stole the land and falsified their ownership, title insurance is a thing.
None of this is impossible. None of this is unknowable. This all happens everyday.
The problem (this time) isn't that they try to deny your title to the property, it's that you sell the property and they freeze your account with the money in it and now the burden is on you to prove that your parents acquired it lawfully, which you have no way to do because it happened many years ago and your parents have passed away.
No. If you have title, it's presumed that the land has been lawfully transferred. If someone/.gov wants to claim otherwise, they need to prove that. The entire mortgage market is predicated on that. Can someone cite an instance where someone who "inherited property had to prove their parents acquired it legally because their funds were frozen after a sale" because I'd be very interested in seeing that. I'd be a LOT more willing to believe that a sale fell through because the BUYERS couldn't verify the parent's title, but that's not what's described here.
It's not the title which is the issue. You transferred the title and received the money and then the bank took the money. The buyer still has the title and doesn't care about you anymore, and you have no claim to get it back because they actually paid you. But then the bank stole the money they paid you because you couldn't prove how you got the title to begin with.
The government actually wouldn’t be able to make these regulations for itself, and the only way it manages to make AML laws work is with a complete governance anti-pattern. Where they simply tell the banks that if they unknowingly allow any “money laundering”, then they will be punished, rather than actually creating some regulations for them to follow. So the institutions just create these kafkaesque nightmares themselves, because they don’t really care about who gets screwed over by them.
The worse part is that money laundering is trivially easy for anybody who wants to do it, it just costs money to do the compliance properly. The only people who get thwarted by these laws are immigrants who do a lot of remittance, and law-abiding wealthy people who naively think they’re entitled to possess their own money. Two groups that society generally doesn’t care at all about protecting.
I personally make a lot of money off the AML compliance industry, so I’m not really complaining for my own sake. But these laws are the intended outcome of “anti-terrorism” and “anti-tax-evasion” policies.