4 ms·

They want privacy for regular people, accountability for the rich and powerful.

by mcv 4y ago

helloworld11 4y ago
This is absolutely laughable. The very opposite is the case: Wealthy, well connected people, politicians and businesses already can and do transfer and launder money on industrial scales, with only minimal worry about rules like this one, which doesn't even really affect their ability to launder or evade. They can instead use armies of lawyers, accountants, political connections for the high levels at which their laundering and tax evading happens. And if those fail, they can then simply pay whatever fines as a cost of doing business while minimizing convictions of real, actual people behind a business structure. This cash prohibition rule on the other hand turns many average people across the EU, possibly millions of them in total into potential lawbreakers just because any number of normally, morally non-criminal random circumstances or worries about digital finances being frozen make them want to have and use cash for modestly large transactions. All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.
- mcv 4y ago
  > modestly large transactions. This is for transactions over 10k. That's not "moderately large". The only time most people make transactions that size is for buying a house, car or life insurance. Those are not transactions that normal people do in cash, and all of them already require significant paperwork anyway. > All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them. Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone. I strongly support the right to privacy, but I'm not naive about the need to fight money laundering or collect taxes.
  - helloworld11 4y ago
    you're presupposing that your experience of cash transactions is and should be everyone's experience of cash transactions. Yes, many normal people sometimes conduct business with larger amounts of cash over 10k euros, which by the way isn't all that much anymore. And even if this is unusual, banning the unusual is a terrible way to run laws. If you defend financial privacy, I can't see how you could defend such an idiotic and intrusive law. >Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone. No, it's a way of defending the basic idea that the state's right to squeeze every penny and justify any law in the name of being able to do so shouldn't be automatically unquestioned. You saying that this cash amount represents a significant piece of income for someone takes as given that the cash in question is being laundered or used for evasion. Do you really believe that this should be a default assumption, or that it's right for the government to assume such guilt just because money is present in someone's daily business? Imagine if all legal issues were handled in such a disgusting way. For some reason, too many people put on emotional blinders and with tax law, ignore how barbarically stupid that is if any respect for presumptions of innocence exists. You are certainly naive about how reliable government is about being able to pry into everything financial, or how absolute should be its right to squeeze for any amount of money.
roenxi 4y ago
That is a lot like asking for a form of secure end-to-end encryption which law enforcement can monitor server-side. If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich.
- sealeck 4y ago
  No it really is not. E2E encryption requires this property because everything happens over a channel which everyone (or, a lot of people) can listen into and the protocol is not really based on trust. Meanwhile the financial system is entirely based on trust (between individuals, banks, individuals and institutions, etc) and people have to place their trust in someone at some point (even very rich people doing very dodgy things with their assets have to trust their bankers at e.g. - perhaps somewhat unwisely - Credit Suisse et al.) The cryptocurrency crowd would like to avoid having to trust anyone ever (but, well, if you look at the systems they design, they're very centralised and rely on networks of trust between lots of people; even within the supposedly iron-clad set of technical rules it's impossible to encode reality, hardly surprising that it's impossible to even encode mathematics in a set of logical rules). The thing that we're missing is that (at least in my opinion) the reason privacy is important to people is that it is a necessary condition for expressing their personality; ability to buy a sex toy without anyone else knowing about it - sure? Same thing about e.g. visiting a gay club and buying a drink if you live in a very (conservative) Christian community. Ability to move a billion dollars into an offshore jurisdiction to avoid paying on tax on it? I personally wouldn't say this is integral to the right to self-expression. > If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich. This is not really true; you don't have to start with the person and locate all their assets. Instead you start with the _assets_ and locate the people who own them (e.g. you see a mystery yacht, and you try to trace the owner).
  - roenxi 4y ago
    What important actions do you envision people being able to do with privacy?
coldtea 4y ago
Muahahahaha! They are one with the rich and powerful...
- mcv 4y ago
  The Greens are not exactly the rich and powerful. If they were, a lot more would have been done about various kind of pollution by now.
LarryMullins 4y ago
10k used to be the price of a new car, now it's the price of a used car. With a few more years of inflation, it will be the price of a used bicycle but the 10k limit will still be a 10k limit.

They want privacy for regular people, accountability for the rich and powerful.

by mcv 4y ago

They want privacy for regular people, accountability for the rich and powerful.

This is absolutely laughable. The very opposite is the case: Wealthy, well connected people, politicians and businesses already can and do transfer and launder money on industrial scales, with only minimal worry about rules like this one, which doesn't even really affect their ability to launder or evade. They can instead use armies of lawyers, accountants, political connections for the high levels at which their laundering and tax evading happens. And if those fail, they can then simply pay whatever fines as a cost of doing business while minimizing convictions of real, actual people behind a business structure. This cash prohibition rule on the other hand turns many average people across the EU, possibly millions of them in total into potential lawbreakers just because any number of normally, morally non-criminal random circumstances or worries about digital finances being frozen make them want to have and use cash for modestly large transactions. All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.

mcv 4y ago
> modestly large transactions. This is for transactions over 10k. That's not "moderately large". The only time most people make transactions that size is for buying a house, car or life insurance. Those are not transactions that normal people do in cash, and all of them already require significant paperwork anyway. > All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them. Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone. I strongly support the right to privacy, but I'm not naive about the need to fight money laundering or collect taxes.
- helloworld11 4y ago
  you're presupposing that your experience of cash transactions is and should be everyone's experience of cash transactions. Yes, many normal people sometimes conduct business with larger amounts of cash over 10k euros, which by the way isn't all that much anymore. And even if this is unusual, banning the unusual is a terrible way to run laws. If you defend financial privacy, I can't see how you could defend such an idiotic and intrusive law. >Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone. No, it's a way of defending the basic idea that the state's right to squeeze every penny and justify any law in the name of being able to do so shouldn't be automatically unquestioned. You saying that this cash amount represents a significant piece of income for someone takes as given that the cash in question is being laundered or used for evasion. Do you really believe that this should be a default assumption, or that it's right for the government to assume such guilt just because money is present in someone's daily business? Imagine if all legal issues were handled in such a disgusting way. For some reason, too many people put on emotional blinders and with tax law, ignore how barbarically stupid that is if any respect for presumptions of innocence exists. You are certainly naive about how reliable government is about being able to pry into everything financial, or how absolute should be its right to squeeze for any amount of money.

roenxi 4y ago

That is a lot like asking for a form of secure end-to-end encryption which law enforcement can monitor server-side. If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich.

sealeck 4y ago
No it really is not. E2E encryption requires this property because everything happens over a channel which everyone (or, a lot of people) can listen into and the protocol is not really based on trust. Meanwhile the financial system is entirely based on trust (between individuals, banks, individuals and institutions, etc) and people have to place their trust in someone at some point (even very rich people doing very dodgy things with their assets have to trust their bankers at e.g. - perhaps somewhat unwisely - Credit Suisse et al.) The cryptocurrency crowd would like to avoid having to trust anyone ever (but, well, if you look at the systems they design, they're very centralised and rely on networks of trust between lots of people; even within the supposedly iron-clad set of technical rules it's impossible to encode reality, hardly surprising that it's impossible to even encode mathematics in a set of logical rules). The thing that we're missing is that (at least in my opinion) the reason privacy is important to people is that it is a necessary condition for expressing their personality; ability to buy a sex toy without anyone else knowing about it - sure? Same thing about e.g. visiting a gay club and buying a drink if you live in a very (conservative) Christian community. Ability to move a billion dollars into an offshore jurisdiction to avoid paying on tax on it? I personally wouldn't say this is integral to the right to self-expression. > If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich. This is not really true; you don't have to start with the person and locate all their assets. Instead you start with the _assets_ and locate the people who own them (e.g. you see a mystery yacht, and you try to trace the owner).
- roenxi 4y ago
  What important actions do you envision people being able to do with privacy?

coldtea 4y ago

Muahahahaha! They are one with the rich and powerful...

mcv 4y ago
The Greens are not exactly the rich and powerful. If they were, a lot more would have been done about various kind of pollution by now.

LarryMullins 4y ago

10k used to be the price of a new car, now it's the price of a used car. With a few more years of inflation, it will be the price of a used bicycle but the 10k limit will still be a 10k limit.