[he "black market" arguments assume that the only source of oppression is from governments....

Trump's Plan for Making Financial Black Markets Great Again

Donald Trump's plan to not only build a y-u-u-u-ge wall along the border with Mexico, but make our neighbor to the South pick up the tab for construction (at padded government rates, no doubt) is supposed to be an example of his think-outside-the-box policy genius.

And a special genius it is. Trump may have stumbled on an effective scheme for reviving flagging Mexican interest in seeking economic opportunity in the United States. And he seems to have hit on a brilliant stimulus for building underground financial markets.

[snip]

Capital controls aren't new, and people around the world have grown proficient at making sure their money gets from Point A to Point B, no matter what the Donald Trumps of the world say.

One possible workaround is that migrants could smuggle—or pay somebody else (think criminal networks) to smuggle—physical cash back to Mexico. That's a bit risky and crude, though, to the point that elegant alternatives have existed for centuries.

"Migrant workers can also send money home via transfer systems, like the hawala system in the Middle East and India, that use a series of brokers to transfer money without having to physically send it abroad," notes Vox.com's Dara Lind.

But technology has cleared the way for even easier transmission of money, Lind adds. "In Africa, for example, where transaction fees on remittances tend to be highest (13 percent of remittances get eaten up in fees), people have started sending money directly by cellphone for much lower fees than banks charge."

Or people could game Trump's restrictions by bypassing the strict letter of the rules.

"The most obvious way around the new provision would be for those who can prove legal residency to send the money for those who cannot," writes Mary Anastasia O'Grady for the Wall Street Journal. "But wire transfers are only one way of moving money. It could also be deposited in a U.S. bank and withdrawn from automatic teller machines in Mexico by intended recipients."

And even higher-tech workarounds are available to people committed to controlling and using their money as they please. In 2013, the Adam Smith Institute's Tim Worstall marveled at Forbes that "Bitcoin was a great way to beat such attempts to limit your freedom to move your money where you want it to be."

Sure enough, it wasn't long before a growing number of people in places including Argentina and China were using the relatively anonymous and difficult to track digital currency to evade capital controls and bogus official exchange rates.

"Argentines are conducting an ambitious experiment, one that threatens ultimately to spread to the United States and disrupt some of the most basic services its banks have to offer," The New York Times cautioned....