There has recently been a major leak of financial documents from banks that offer private banking services, known as the Pandora Papers. It reveals information such as large scale ownership of houses and apartment buildings in London by dictators and their children.
It has me thinking about the concept of financial privacy. If financial privacy is a human right, then all people should be entitled to it, regardless of what crimes they might have committed, in law or against humanity (such as the subjugation of people in a dictatorship).
For ordinary people, financial privacy is important in that it can protect you from retaliation if people find out that you buy something that is deemed immoral or taboo in your society. For example, your purchases could potentially out you as homosexual, or belonging to a particular political group, if it is known to all.
I think it comes down to the answer to another question. What is money in the first place? In one sense, money is a tool to facilitate trade, the exchange of goods and services. But in another sense it is more than that, it is an abstraction of what society owes you as an individual. This is true especially for fiat currency. US dollars have value because they provide you purchasing power in the US economic system. Holding dollars enables you to make purchases in that system, or in other words, holding dollars is a reflection of how much of US economic system you would be allowed to take in exchange for the dollars that you have.
Those dictators who own land in the UK, how did they get them? What likely happened, as in the case of virtually all dictators, is that they pilfered revenue from their own home country. They then exchanged currency for British pounds. Then, using a shell corporation in the Bahamas, they were able to use the British pounds to buy housing in London.
If money is a reflection of purchasing power that someone is entitled to, at what point did a dictator become entitled to purchase property in London? They never did anything good for the people of the UK, nor did they do anything good for their own country. So why should they get a share of the British economic system to buy housing in it? They came unto that money via illicit means - which is exactly why they hid their ownership using private banking services and shell companies.
In the early days of Steem, Dan Larimer wrote about the conflict in cryptocurrency between financial privacy (such is the aim of privacy coins like Monero) and transparency, which is core to how blockchains function. He advocated for radical transparency, where instead of trying to subvert the native transparency built into cryptocurrency, we embrace it in such a way that all ownership and all transactions on chain are highly transparent. Any institution operating on chain is expected to be as transparent as any other - and so if they do things with that money that are questionable to society at large, they can be taken to account for it.
I'm still not sure which side of this argument I sit on. I don't think that the super rich who only got their wealth by abusing their own country should be entitled to any respect for their wealth. Yet I'm also not sure how well radical transparency can actually stand up to violence and intimidation for individuals, when everyone knows how much money you have and how you got it.
