Given the way the financial world occasionally fucks everyone, I think that large scale unauditable transfers of cash around the place may well be bad in and of themselves.

I don't really see a difference between the two.

The first is what everyone can agree on is evil and the later is what we haven't agreed on (or not yet).

To quote from the page on malum in se; "The phrase is used to refer to conduct assessed as sinful or inherently wrong by nature, independent of regulations governing the conduct", which I don't think is a thing tbh.

Murdering your wife is wrong by nature.

Moving some money around without telling the government is only illegal because it's illegal.

To me, the difference is whether or not there is a victim. No victim, no wrongdoing.

I think its debatable.

If you knowingly helped a murderer dispose of a body, that’s wrong by nature right? Money laundering is the financial equivalent of that.

No, money laundering is the financial equivalent of running a taxi service and not asking any questions about the luggage.

It's not necessarily disposing of a body, and punishing people for moving luggage around without asking questions is obviously absurd.

Terrible analogy. The number of people that would even have any desire to put something illegal in taxi luggage is very low. The number of people wanting to launder money because they did something truly evil is very high.

International airlines are a better analogy; should we just let people run weapons, drugs, even children in their luggage, with no mechanism for inspection?

Right, then you're tax avoiding, and should be charged with tax avoidance.

In cases where you're not tax avoiding, why does money laundering have to be a separate crime? It comes back to "Money laundering is just a cheat code for prosecutors to get easy points when they can't actually find real wrongdoing."