Yes, I do understand the connection between corruption and money laundering. That touches on one form of corruption. There are many others. If I were to eliminate corruption, I'd take measures like:
- Extend laws like FOIA and Open Meetings, dramatically, so we have a much clearer understanding of government. In particular, I'd extend enforcement and penalties. Wilful violations should be criminal.
- Extend such laws to cover non-profits as well. I should be able to ask a church, a university, or any other organization exempt from taxes for documents, or sit in on governance meetings.
- Put in stronger whistleblower protections, and eliminate a lot of the power of NDA / non-disparage / etc agreements
- Increase SEC-mandated transparency measures
... and so on. Those have nothing to do with money laundering, and to me, are strict wins.
Very little of the corruption I've seen involves bags of money. Most corruption involves things like (not directly financial) preferential treatment. If I give you a raise you don't deserve, give your child preferential treatment at my school, or cut a sweet deal for your company, that doesn't show up in a Paypal transaction.
As I said, that's precisely because the world works the way it does, rather than the way you wish it did. The bottleneck for lots of otherwise extremely profitable criminal endeavors is their reliance on traditional financial intermediaries.
> That touches on one form of corruption.
I'm talking about the type of corruption that keeps entire countries from developing economically. I don't know what you're on about. And no, your series of suggestions, which amount to saying make the current regulations stronger, doesn't come close to closing a huge loophole created by giving blanket immunity to financial intermediaries.
Edit: honestly it sounds like you ran into some unfortunate situation somewhere and hold a personal grudge. But that's not a particularly meaningful basis for policy recommendation, especially given that it's quite clear that you don't understand the domain particularly well.
> Most corruption involves things like (not directly financial) preferential treatment. If I give you a raise you don't deserve, give your child preferential treatment at my school, or cut a sweet deal for your company, that doesn't show up in a Paypal transaction.
Most corruption is like this when you live in a country where corruption isn't much of a problem.
I'm done here.
No, you can't infer how much someone knows about a topic, at least from the discussion here. You can infer they know something different than you do. That happens when you get a modern-day Republican and Democrat in the same room, and each believes the other to be an idiot. The same happens if people are from different countries, cultures, or hold different values.
Groups develop groupthink, with a common set of information, logic, and conclusions. It's natural to assume anyone who doesn't share those is an idiot. My own experience is that they're often not idiots, and if I go in with an open mind, I often learn something (and quite often, we both do), although that's been harder with recent political polarization. Nowadays, discussions usually shift to people calling me an idiot if I don't line up 100% with their worldview. It's been rarer and rarer to have intelligent discussions.
Perhaps my conclusions were wrong. They often are; on average, we're right about half the time in discussions, and that's fine. Perhaps yours are too. Perhaps we're right in different contexts (we might live in different countries, for example).
However, where you took this discussion, neither of us has any chance of discovering what the other's opinions were informed by. If you doubt something I'm saying, you can ask for evidence, rather than assuming and insulting. Perhaps each of us might have learned something.
In either case, that's as far as I'm willing to take this discussion. I nerd on topics like these for fun. Getting insulted is tiring and draining rather than fun. You're welcome to believe I'm an idiot.
I propose we terminate this discussion. People are welcome to be wrong on the internet.
> If I were to make a list of my top-10 problems, corruption would be near the top. None of the cases I've seen involved money laundering.
rather clearly reveals your lack of understanding of the topic at hand. The fact that you think this has anything to do with political polarization is another clue that you have no idea what you're talking about. Your repeated attempts to anchor all of this to your personal experience are also quite revealing with respect to both your bias and lack of grounding in the subject.
And this isn't about your conclusions being wrong - it's just that you (and people like you) seem to form absurdly strong opinions when you don't even have the slightest clue regarding why things are the way they are.
Btw, since you are now pretending that you were this intellectually eager person just trying to have an honest discussion and I somehow poisoned the exchange, let me remind you that this was your first contribution:
> If I were to list my top 10 problems in life, money laundering would not make the list.
Which, of course, is combative, dismissive and arrogant. Why on earth is your personal list of "top 10 problems in life" relevant to any discussion? Who the hell do you think you are? It's the type of response that immediately signals lack of interest in learning anything, which you have since confirmed.
> I'm done here.
> I propose we terminate this discussion
You can do whatever you want - is your next reply also going to mention how you're really done this time?