The true crime is involving a multinational corporation in a transaction between two private individuals at the local market.

I like cash because it's direct, and where possible I avoid paying by card because I don't want the merchant to pay fees to third parties.

In Europe, most of the time, using cash doesn't imply avoiding taxes on the transaction, but having cash is essentially sovereignty.

In Italy there is a very aggressive law against money laundering: if you withdraw more than 1k cash, it triggers a call to the police. I know it's the same if you do it over multiple days.

I think it has been relaxed a little bit later on, but in Italy everybody does the "I'll charge you X less without VAT" (which is 23% in Italy, I should point out), so this is also fighting that.

POSWID* says that money laundering laws are intended mostly to keep the proles and other people within the system honest, while providing a clean and easy system for people with enough money or cachet to bypass it.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Here are the last two sentences:

> Governments don’t do anything about the status quo, for a number of reasons: it inconveniences them to look too deeply into the darker corners of their own financial systems, and they make money from printing their own currencies and don’t much care how that cash is used. But most of all, they don’t do anything about it because they haven’t got a clue.

The last one couldn't be farther from the truth, and the first one couldn't be farther from a lie.

The state's ability to track and criminalize people based on financial behaviors through deputized financial intermediaries is new, and temporary.

Outside of this social graph, where private cash transactions still exist, the state lacks power and relies on stigmatizing cash ownership, consumption, movement. This stigma is largely successful and ubiquitous but inconsequential to anybody that matters or has a lawyer of their own.

Electronic settlement of funds since the 1970s has allowed for the state to leverage financial institutions for records and enforcement. Electronic settlement without institutions since the 2010s removes that power from the government and is merely a reversion to the mean. Any delay in the prevalence of this is both user-error, social stigma, and a government's unfamiliarity with the reality that their own constitutions and documents that organize the state are things that have to be updated to actually remove an expectation of privacy from finance.

> We don’t know what successful money launderers are doing in the present moment. All we do know is what unsuccessful ones have been caught doing in the past.

One major and necessary fallacy inside the social graph is that electronic settlement between institutions assumes that the deputized institutions have blessed the funds and user as not money laundered. Only the user and who they transact with can trigger an investigation by the government at this point, by reporting the money for taxes or in a large withdrawal to cash out of the social graph, without further laundering it. This user error is mostly mitigated as soon as cross border payments are done, because the next financial institution doubly assumes funds from another country's banks are clean. The banks and sovereignty become the washing machine inside the electronic settlement system.

This is doubly important to realize, because it's the tip of the iceberg in brand sovereignty. One country's illegality is not another country's illegality.

You can't simultaneously be for a stigma against withdrawing large amounts of cash, while considering the Communist Party's capital controls to be oppressive. Removing one capital control, blesses the other.

This is a blind spot for most people, since they don't consider them to be the same things, but fortunately this cognitive dissonance highlights the reality. It is impossible to completely stigmatize and the capital routes around the stigma and all capital controls, unless the entire world is under a single totalitarian regime.

All while only the edges, moving between physical cash and electronic system, and moving cash between borders and the electronic system, are policed, in what could really only be the ultimate hubris of expecting the state to be involved at all.

And it's not just cash. Its assets too. The state is hoping for titled and electronic settlement of assets. In the last 30 years a systematic global dismantling of explicit "bearer assets" has been done, when the bearer assets were offered by the state. But this is also unsuccessful, as since the 2010s, the bearer assets created and settled without a financial intermediary have existed and been wildly popular.

All capital controls have been obsoleted while they were never fully implemented to begin with. No matter whether that's the idea of your neighbor holding a lot of physical cash, or a subject of the Communist Party in another country circumventing capital controls you consider oppressive.

This article covers the same points with a wildly contrived conclusion: To attempt to change anything in favor of the state being more effective at enforcing its invented crime of money laundering instead of curbing the actual illicit behaviors. For reasons that are assumed and unexplained, so it's impossible for me to change my view on. My view is simple - capital controls are dead and a waste of time. The article and both books it references actually agree on that. My other view is that the state should just do classic investigative work on illegal behaviors which means finding the people involved and subpoena-ing them, something it seems to have forgotten how to do in favor of relying on deputized intermediaries who are temporary, ineffective, and inconvenience just the law abiding.

Alternative to archive.ph

Disable Javascript and CSS

For example

   curl https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/john-lanchester/squillions \
   |sed '1s/^/<meta http-equiv=content-security-policy content=\"default-src none\">/' > 1.htm
   firefox ./1.htm 

There are also Firefox add-ons that can do this as well

Or use a text-only browser

   links https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/john-lanchester/squillions 
   links -dump https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/john-lanchester/squillions