The regulation of money amounts to a reduction of freedom. Is it worth it?
Regulating money, e.g., requiring a paper trail for financial accounts and transactions, allows for those who control the money supply to control those who use money.
The common criminal is thus thwarted, but organized crime with tremendous resources to black markets, money laundering, and trading in commodities other than money are not. Similarly, the poor person or small business is thwarted from doing small illegal things, but the very wealthy individuals and large corporations (e.g., Enron) who can take advantage of loopholes, offshore accounts, are not.
Consider a radical change in philosophy: any financial transaction between two consenting parties remains 100% private, beyond the reach of any subpoena or regulation, even if a third party such as a bank or credit card company is involved. Anyone can create anonymous accounts to move money around, buy things, sell things.
What will happen? The world will change a lot. It does equalize the playing field. Many forms of taxation will become impossible; however, taxation by inflation (the government simply prints the money it needs to spend) is still possible.
It perhaps becomes very difficult to track criminals and investigate crimes or thwart pre-crimes. Is that the price of freedom? Society will probably adapt.
How much power money can buy is probably an issue here. If money can't buy very much power, then deregulating it won't cause much harm.
Inspired by a talk by Undersecretary of Treasury John Taylor about the U.S. freezing terrorists' assets. We hope such power is only used for good, but realistically, it almost certainly isn't.
Also inspired by Bitcoin, which promises such privacy. What if we were to write the law to match Bitcoin?
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