I have a right to privacy, and a right for my actions to be free from government scrutiny until, at the very minimum, they can show probable cause with a search warrant.
Deputizing the banks to spy on me just makes those banks obligated to the same rules.
Money laundering is a crime predicated on the idea that the money I rightfully own is something they should be able to confiscate from me on hypothetical crimes, and they're attempts to seize it often cause people to try to make it less suspicious to the government. It's bizarre.
If they wanted to fight organized crime, the simple way was always to legalize cocaine, meth, and heroin, and sell that shit out of liquor stores in plain retail packages, all manufactured by regulated pharmaceutical companies that would produce it for a fixed, low profit-over-cost, in measured doses and free from unsafe adulterants.
Government causes problems with bad laws, blames the problems on the criminals, then makes more bad laws to punish them for it, causing more problems. As it is now, it's illegal for you to own and possess cash, though they tend to ignore it as long as you don't keep any in tempting amounts (typically less than $1000).
Again, how exactly do you define money laundering? Currently the definition by law seems to be, "anything that could be used to hide criminal activity." In that case, yes, there are plenty of legitimate, non-criminal reasons to make transactions that "could be used" to hide criminal activity. Is privacy a crime?
I'm pretty sure money laundering at least requires intent.
Doing anything to intentionally avoid triggering scrutiny policies is a crime, even if you're not doing anything else wrong.
Unfortunately, we run into the same problems as DMCA where hugely powerful, essential corporations run into poorly crafted laws that don't function at scale, and small users that never did anything wrong get shafted.
For example, I was living and working in Ukraine and without some sort of.. let's call it instruments... I would not have been able to get my money in the clear and legal into the western bank. Because obviously all money earned in Ukraine could only be made criminally, no way a ukrainian programmer could earn some. Must be a criminal.
One western bank even told me in private: "we do understand stealing a train of coal and laundering bribes from Ukraine, this is common and the risk is clear for us; but we have no idea about your IT stuff and things, it scares us".
Of course, it's getting easier today in some ways but good luck exporting any substantial amount of money from Ukraine into the world and in the clear. Practically impossible without some help of money laundering services.
Now I expect to be downvoted to hell because the everyday reality of being from a third-world country is incomprehensible to American people so it must be me in the wrong.
