"Money laundering" is an imaginary crime. If certain patterns of transactions were not arbitrarily outlawed, there would be no need to enforce this law.
All kinds of fraud and theft of money from credit card and banking account data are very real crimes, and for them the main effective method of detection is following the money trail, and the main effective method of prevention is making the laundering hard, since already laundering is the difficult part that limits the scale of such operations, not the actual theft/fraud.
Wonder why there is such thing as spam of "earn $$$ working from home handling bills online" ? It's because someone there has excess capacity to steal money, but not enough capacity to launder it.
Insofar as the logical basis for classifying them as "crimes," yes, I am. Not in terms of seriousness or morality, obviously. Also, conflating money laundering and tax evasion shows a serious lack of understanding. Tax evasion can involve money laundering, sure, but money laundering is often the mechanism used to enable far more serious crimes, including, yes, murder.
Many things "enable" murder, including cars, guns, bullets, knives, etc. In any case this utilitarianism is a dead end. If it is not absolutely fungible, it's not money, it's coupons, food stamps, tokens, but not money and will not ultimately be used as such.
I agree and would add that trade via currency is in all cases voluntary. Prosecution of "money laundering" is a standard tool in the tool belt of all collectivist regimes who ultimately find it necessary to attempt to control as much activity as is technologically feasible.
