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posted by martyb on Friday March 01 2019, @12:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the think-global-act-local dept.

The amount of $100 bills in circulation is surging. And it's leaving some economists scratching their heads.

The number of outstanding U.S. $100 bills has doubled since the financial crisis, with more than 12 billion of them across the world, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve. C-notes have passed $1 bills in circulation, Deutsche Bank chief international economist Torsten Slok said in a note to clients this week.

[...] "By eliminating high denomination, high value notes we would make life harder for those pursuing tax evasion, financial crime, terrorist finance and corruption," [former Standard Chartered bank chief executive Peter] Sands wrote.

The global illicit money flows were "staggering" and fuel crimes from drug trafficking and human smuggling to theft and fraud, Sands said. He estimated that depending on the country, tax evasion robs the public sector of anywhere between 6 percent and 70 percent of what authorities estimate they should be collecting. And despite "huge investments in transaction surveillance systems, and intelligence, less than 1 percent of illicit financial flows are seized.

[...] "The Federal Reserve and Treasury make 99 dollars for every $100 dollar bill they print and sell offshore," Colas said. "There's a natural desire to keep printing these things — the U.S. government makes a lot of money selling them."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/27/theres-been-a-mysterious-surge-in-100-bills-in-circulation-possibly-linked-to-global-corruption.html

Superbills?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar


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  • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday March 01 2019, @04:00PM (9 children)

    by Unixnut (5779) on Friday March 01 2019, @04:00PM (#808748)

    I never heard anyone claim tax evasion is theft, although I am sure some people think like that.

    I have however, heard many claims that taxation is theft. If you think about it, it is essentially no different than paying protection money to the mafia.

    You see, you have this organisation, and they offer you protection, in return for paying what they feel you should for their services. In return, you get their armed thugs protecting you and your business from others, and they will mediate if you have disputes with other people under their protection. If you have a dispute with someone under another organisations protection, they will back you up (as long as it is in their interest usually). They will also regulate their estate and make sure things are running smoothly and money is being earned (because if those paying the protection money go bust, there is no more money for them), including and up to providing services to facilitate this. However if you refuse to pay up, or try to avoid paying what they think you owe, then they come with their thugs and bring violence upon your person and business, from locking you up to depriving you of life if they feel like it.

    In the above sentence, you can substitute "protection money" with "taxes", and "thugs" with "police", "organisation" with "government", and the above still holds true.

    They say while opposites attract, familiarity breeds contempt. That is probably why Governments and Mafias have so much contempt for each other. They either essentially wage war against each other, or they meld together into one unit, getting so intertwined in some cases that you can't be sure where one ends and the other begins.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 01 2019, @04:07PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday March 01 2019, @04:07PM (#808756)

    it is essentially no different than paying protection money to the mafia.

    You are absolutely right, however, as little as I care for our local, state and federal protection rackets, I do prefer them to any others that I have gotten to know in the last 50 years.

    Remember the two things that are certain in life. Unless we expand into the universe where you have a choice to live independently without potentially infringing on the rights of others, taxes will continue to be a certainty. For those who cannot, or choose not to re-wire their brains to not crave social contact, I would say that taxes will continue to be a certainty much longer than death will.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @04:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @04:44PM (#808780)

    People who claim any modern nation-state has consent of the governed are redefining it in a disingenuous way given that literally a single person they claim control over dissenting suffices to void it.

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday March 01 2019, @06:04PM (6 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday March 01 2019, @06:04PM (#808811)

    You're carefully neglecting the major advantage of governments over crime syndicates: Scale.

    Sure, governments sometimes fight each other, but there's usually enough peace in most of the territory that people can generally go about their business without risking being killed in the streets. There are major advantages to that, such as being able to construct infrastructure that is durable because it's unlikely to be blown up in the near future. Even in wartime, there's typically a lot of territory that is far away from the front lines and thus relatively safe to be in.

    Do you think that much scientific research happens when your scientists expect to be killed by random gun battles between rival gangs? Nope, because those scientists aren't dumb enough to spend their time on, say, chemistry, when they could be spending their time learning how to avoid being killed.

    For more on this argument, see Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @06:41PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @06:41PM (#808839)

      The necessity of governments governing those who do not consent does not morally justify it. It is immoral, even as it is necessary.

      If Hobbes argues against this point then please summarize his points, IIRC Leviathan starts with pages and pages of definitions and I didn't bother reading past them.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday March 01 2019, @07:54PM (3 children)

        by Thexalon (636) on Friday March 01 2019, @07:54PM (#808889)

        The necessity of governments governing those who do not consent does not morally justify it.

        On the contrary, I think it does.

        Imagine, for argument's sake, a land with no government and no outside enemies to worry about.

        In this land are many people who are productive and make all the food, housing, clothing, etc that this society needs. However, there are also a few people who survive not by producing anything useful and trading it for other useful stuff that they need, but by beating, killing, and robbing others. Don't claim these people don't exist, because they've existed in every human society in recorded history, and there's a way to deal with them. And these folks will not submit to any kind of authority from anybody unless forced to.

        Do you as someone living in this society (a) let these few murdering robbers continue to murder and rob unabated, (b) help the other productive people work together to deal with the murdering robbers, or (c) hope that some individual stops them by force?

        If you picked (a), then the murdering robbers are diminishing the productive people's freedom by taking away their lives and stuff, and will end up through a combination of violence and threats of violence becoming absolute rulers of some kind, oppressing the productive people as they see fit. This is exactly what happened in the late 400's CE in the wake of the Roman Empire's collapse.

        If you picked (b), congratulations, you've picked some form of consent-of-the-governed government. You'll have to deal with complexities like sorting out who is a murdering robber and who isn't, and potentially pooling some of the resources of everyone in this land - including the reluctant ones - to make sure that these folks are caught and somehow made to be no longer a threat to everybody else.

        If you picked (c), then either the murdering robber's friends and relatives will get revenge on whoever took out the murdering robber, in which case you get a cycle of clan feuds and constant battles a la Hatfields and McCoys, or that person defeats the people seeking revenge too and becomes an absolute ruler. Either one carries its own problems.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @08:36PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @08:36PM (#808919)

          Killing a person to prevent them violating one's rights doesn't violate their rights. Writing this out in full takes a whole lot of space, and most of it is spent on edge cases which are obvious and tediously careful wording, so I'll skip over the details of what I consider peoples rights to be. Forming a police force which enforces/defends peoples rights is morally permissible, provided no member take any action which they haven't the right to. The victims grant the police the right to defend them from the bandits, and so they gain that right so long as it is granted. This does imply that they may not defend the rights of those who do not consent, but practically this doesn't matter since it can be safely assumed all do.

          This does imply they have to form a court system etc, but that's really just a question of how certain one has to be an action doesn't violate a anyone's rights before taking it, which isn't what we're discussing though it is interesting.

          This group though doesn't have any rights not granted it. They can act to defend Bob, because Bob has that right and grants them it. If the members grant the organization the right to tax them, then it has the right to do so. The organization may take Bob's property if he grants them that right, this is acceptable because Bob himself has that right and may grant it as he wishes.

          If nobody grants the organization the right to take Alice's property though, then it doesn't have that right. It doesn't matter if Bob says it's ok, or if five million people say it's ok, they can't grant a right they themselves don't possess, the organization has no right it is not granted by one who possesses it.

          Imagine a hijacked plane with a nuclear weapon aboard inbound to some large city, with a single innocent passenger on board. It would be murder to shoot that plane down and save tens of millions of lives. It's a circumstance that would move me to do evil and shoot it down, but just because I can imagine choosing to do it doesn't mean it isn't evil to do.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @09:11PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @09:11PM (#808932)

            Your best bet for convincing me of the legitimacy of governing the unconsenting it to convince me of utilitarianism.

            Your best bet for convincing me of utilitarianism is to argue that morality isn't intrinsic to reality, it's just the set of behavioral restrictions we're personally ok with forcing on nonconsenting people with violence. I am, for example, happy to use violence against a nonconsenting person to force them to not steal from me, and so I consider that moral. Push on this a little and one ends up concluding that "X is immoral." just means "I'm willing to use violence against nonconsenting people to stop them doing X.".

            Morality then is merely a partial description of one's utility function/decision theory, specifically the set of actions they license which involve doing violence to nonconsenting parties to prevent or force an action from them. As such any morality which calls an act we ourselves would perform evil is simply mistaken, and incorrectly describes those actions we are willing to perform, because morality is descriptive not prescriptive.

            Therefore the fact I am willing to shoot the plane down demonstrates that I consider it moral, and I am simply using the words morality/moral/immoral/etc incorrectly in my post.

            This doesn't answer the question of what one's morality ought be though, and just kicks the can down the road to what one's utility function/decision theory ought be. Strong arguments can be made for what one's decision theory ought be, leaving only one's utility function undetermined.

            While this argument doesn't answer the question of what ought be moral, it does at least argue that everyone already is a utilitarian and just use deontological heuristics.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @09:58PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @09:58PM (#808952)

              What our utility function is isn't directly chosen by us, though it can be influenced by our choices. Rational agents will never ascribe positive expected utility to changing their utility function at the time they are considering doing so*. Therefore our utility functions will, to the extent we are rational, only drift neutrally and so we don't need to care about altering them. Therefore our morality is out of our hands to the extent we act rationally, and what appear to be people altering their morality are actually just people deciding that a given strategy leads to greater expected utility (e.g. because they feel good for having done so/because they avoid feeling bad/because it's just habit they got into due to a process with positive expected utility (e.g. obeying parents on moral matters and not bothering to reconsider)/because they avoid prison/et c.).

              Therefore I, and all others, already do seek maximum utility without regard for morality, because it can't influence our behavior but is rather a description of it. Choosing to be honorable so that others will be is just a decision theory problem, not anything deeper. My prior sacrifices of utility in the name of morality were just the products of a heuristic for maximizing utility, and still good decisions because they caused others to trust me, which is more beneficial than the utility I would have obtained even if never betrayed.

              I believe that maximum utility will be obtained from pseudo-rights, where they're respected up to a point and then are ignored, as almost all people currently support but mistakenly call rights.

              Guess I'm a statist now. Didn't expect that. This has been coming for a while, but I didn't expect such a sharp 180 into egoism.

              Please point out any mistakes, I'm tired and know fuck all about this topic. I'll think all this through properly over the coming days/weeks. I don't expect my actual behavior will change in the slightest because of this, being trustworthy is far too valuable to give up for the utterly minor gains I could have by violating other's rights.

              *newcomblike problems aside, accounting for them isn't needed to communicate my point.

    • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday March 01 2019, @11:30PM

      by krishnoid (1156) on Friday March 01 2019, @11:30PM (#808989)

      Sure, governments sometimes fight each other, but there's usually enough peace in most of the territory that people can generally go about their business without risking being killed in the streets. There are major advantages to that, such as being able to construct infrastructure that is durable because it's unlikely to be blown up in the near future. Even in wartime, there's typically a lot of territory that is far away from the front lines and thus relatively safe to be in.

      Ok, now repeat that in an overdone Italian mobstah accent, tack on details on how yehr organization is assistin' in providing this infrastructure in the local community, and my vote's for you winning the discussion.