To try and give you a partial answer, you may want to consider the fact that money is essentially equivalent to freedom.

Giving governments absolute oversight of the flow of money and of a detailed accounting of who owns what is therefore equivalent to implementing a planet-scale fine-grained surveillance state. Yay.

Is that a world you'd want to live in?

Or more interestingly, if you're a government official that also happens to be a half decent human being (I'm told they do exist), wouldn't you carefully consider how much control you'd like a government to have over so-called "dirty money" vs having every single penny a citizen spends/owns recorded in a database?

Or if you even want to be milder about it, where do you draw the line between total government control of money flows and privacy?

This whole conversation around "dirty money" is the exact same old "won't you think of the children" bogeyman that's being bandied about every time the government wants to restrict freedoms and uses basic citizen's cowardice to entice them to make the trade of less freedom for more security.

[edit]: by the way, you are very correct when you say that citizens aren't paying attention. With increased fine-grained control of money, one of their absolute basic freedoms is being not just eroded, but plain old erased.

And no one is talking about it or debating it. Find me one mainstream politician in the anglo sphere that even has this problem on his radar.

Money is also power. And having some people with thousands of times the power as others also erodes freedoms. Perhaps those with the most power should be faced with the most scrutiny? This isn't about some global authoritarianism, but an attempt to mitigate oligarchy, and should only affect those who already have far more freedom then the majority of the population combined.

You're just serving the libertarian agenda, and I'm having none of it.

Money is not freedom. Money is a tool to trade goods. I was talking about how a minority of fraudsters are hiding their money to not be taxed, and to escape scrutiny, and you're arguing for less government.

>You're just serving the libertarian agenda, and I'm having none of it

You appear to be operating on faith (smells libertarian therefore it's bad) rather than arguments, I guess having a conversation is pointless.

Another thing: there is a vast difference between hiding money to avoid the taxman (something that falls under the "civil disobedience" category, especially when said taxman is exerting unchecked power) and hiding money that was earned committing crimes that actually hurt people (slave trafficking, dictators, etc...).

But the standard discourse served to the unwashed masses is more than happily co-mingling the two issues because it once again is very useful in scaring the flock straight.

> there is a vast difference between

Both are illegal.

You're trying to equate a major crime with civil disobedience. Big financial interests are far from the public interest, so I can't follow your argument of civil disobedience.

> taxman is exerting unchecked power

There are so many who argue about money corrupting politics, inequality rising, but I'm not trying to have this argument with you. I just want to tell you that you're exposing yourself as defending big financial interests, against the public interests.

I've already had some back and forth with people like you who try to defend the act of evading taxes, and I can warn you: you will never convince me. Let's agree to disagree.

>I've already had some back and forth with people like you who try to defend the act of evading taxes, and I can warn you: you will never convince me. Let's agree to disagree.

If your debating strategy is to self-proclaim as close-minded and incapable of intelligent conversation, far be it from me to try and stop you :)

And anyways, at some point, if you dig deep enough in people's politics, you always hit the same bedrock: either you're a collectivist and essentially an enemy of individual freedom, or you always give priority to individual freedom before that of the group.

I suspect it's a genetic thing, and you are correct: trying to change one's genetic makeup is pointless via argumentation is basically pointless. Born a sheep, always a sheep.

If you really think that things are so black and white, then so be it, don't need to tell people they're sheeps.