Brett

It seems like a dumb question, but why exactly is the act of moving money around illegal? Obviously if someone's laundering money, they're doing it to conceal the money's criminal origin, but if you can already prove that the money is coming from an illegitimate source, then wouldn't you already have enough evidence to charge them with whatever crime they were committing to obtain said money? To me it seems redundant to make the act of laundering money illegal when such a crime is predicated on the perpetrator committing some other crime to obtain the money in the first place.

Here's a hypothetical to better illustrate my point: Say that you and your pal are both drug dealers. You launder your drug money but your pal doesn't. One day, the two of you get busted; you would get a harsher sentence (since you'd get charged with two crimes) than your buddy, despite the fact that the only difference between you and him was that you were paying taxes on your drug money and he wasn't.

If a crime is going to happen regardless (Let's not kid ourselves, if someone is willing to go ahead and break the law to sell illegal substances then obviously they'd have no problem breaking laws against money laundering either) you might as well let the criminals pay taxes on their income until you can charge them for the actual crimes they've committed, no?