Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Dispatches from the War on Cash
Once upon a time, thieves gave you a choice: your money or your life. Not the government: it wants both. As if it is not enough that the state knows absolutely everything you do electronically, it’s moving to make the last private vestige of our lives digital as well. “The war on cash is advancing on all fronts,” reports Zerohedge in “First they came for the pennies“. The consequences of going cashless are manifold and hard to overstate, especially in terms of loss of privacy and autonomy.
Sweden’s citizens have become willing guinea pigs in an experiment consisting of negative interest rates in a near cashless society. Even homeless vendors of street newspapers carry mobile card readers. The situation is similar in Denmark. In sub-Saharan Africa, going cashless is nearly a matter of survival, not convenience, as few have bank accounts, but nearly everyone has a mobile phone. (Side note: is this the solution to voter ID in the United State?) Western NGOs such as the Gates Foundation are working with governments, banks, and credit card companies to replace cash with mobile money platforms. India hopes to do the same.
Consequences include banks taking a cut of every transaction and keeping extensive, eternal records of who you are and what you do. Going cashless is likely the only strategy that allows central planners to continue Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP), since rational savers will take cash out of the banking system under such circumstances. It is nothing more than legal theft by the authorities. It seems the general public sees only the “convenience” of going cashless.
As I see it, the most dangerous and durable form of totalitarianism is the one in which the fatted herd enjoys many diversions, right up until to door of the abattoir.
Published in Culture, Economics
I pay cash for anything about $50 and down. It’s no one’s business what I buy. I’d do it for larger purchases, too, but all that cash is bulky.
That is just why, despite 97% loss of purchasing power of the dollar since 1913, there are no longer $1000 bills. Bulky cash is more difficult to hide from those who believe it is all their money.
I was an election judge in Texas this year. Photo ID required to vote. One woman tried to vote using a picture of her drivers license on her Iphone. I refused to let her vote conventionally with it.
“But the picture looks just like me,” she said. I pointed out photoshop let you do that, and Texas law stated a valid Texas driver’s license was acceptable picture ID, not a picture of a valid Texas driver’s license. I told her she could vote provisionally, but she didn’t bother.
A question to police officers – Would you accept a photo of a driver’s license at a traffic stop?
Seawriter
Sounds a lot like the world Mack Reynolds was writing about back in the 1950s and 1960s.
Seawriter
Gee, John, Claire has a post asking for geopolitical predictions. Unicard was prescient to the max. Want to try your mind on the world at large? I’m pretty sure it will come apart in very unpleasant ways. I’m just not sure which catalyst or what route to max entropy.
Oh great, one more item for my worry list. I love the privacy of spending cash, and I suspect that many legislators and bureaucrats take the view that using cash is the same as money laundering. I mean what have you got to fear, anyway, if you aren’t doing anything naughty with the cash, eh?
Should this hit the U.S. in a big way, there will be lots of very annoyed waiters, but I suppose that the numismatists will flourish.
A cashless society is not having Credits as in a Star Trek life but rather a truly dystopian anomaly. The money laundering laws are a stretch as well. As it stands, you are guilty until – Good luck.
Try purchasing a big ticket ítem such as a new car via cash or wire transfer. Gets interesting and very telling. Quatloos anyone ?
I just read “Unicard.” Memo to self: Never read dystopic, highly-plausible imaginings from one of the most fertile minds on Ricochet before having a second cup of coffee!
On second thought, I think I’ll pass on the second cup of coffee and go directly to the soma.
Ironically, I have recently decided to start using cash more.
What I think drives the cashless society more than the government is the convenience. With almost all large employers and banks requiring direct deposit of paychecks it is inconvenient to go the the bank (or even an ATM to get cash). When you had to go to the bank to deposit your check anyway, it was a simple matter to get part of your paycheck in cash.
Add in the IRS propensity for asset seizure based on ‘large’ cash transactions approaching 5 figures.
Zerohedge? The 9-11 truther, GMO-fearing blog? Perhaps pick a less muddled source next time?
Seizure of large amounts of cash is now common in law enforcement. “Where did you get this $10,000? Did you steal it? Are you a drug courier?”.
Cops can now seize your cash, and the burden is on you to prove that it’s legitimate money. Further, some police departments see this is a revenue opportunity.
These two issues (cash versus electronic and privacy) don’t have to go together. Bitcoin is entirely electronic and entirely anonymous, which is why governments tend to hate it. Admittedly it’s not widely accepted, but it does exist as an alternative.
Might as well carry signs.
Your entire life will be an open book. To your government, to employers, to hackers.
Well, not to toot my own horn, but we talked about this in May when I first brought it up…
Also of note, officials somewhere within the government are looking at getting tracking devices (probably passive RFID chips, at first) into paper money as part of the security upgrades. Source: my father, several years ago, who worked in the financial industry and attended a small talk on cash-handling security. I forget which department the government official worked in, though I’d guess it’s somewhere in the treasury.
Bah! Cash is for chumps, and drug dealers. The convenience of electronic payments is so great. Furthermore electronic payments offer clear benefits in the case of fraud and theft. Someone steals your wallet all your cash is gone. Someone steals your credit card you shut it down and all they have is worthless plastic. In a world where your transactions are recorded you have full control over improper transactions.
In a world where you carry untraceable currency on you in vast quantities the benefit of robbery is vast. No one is going to hold up a credit card reader.
As someone concerned with privacy online, ironically I almost never use cash. But then again, I have nothing to hide. To me, cash is a liability, and more often than not, your cash is safer in a bank.
I am using cash a lot more as well.
One of the reasons is I work for a mortgage broker a couple afternoons a week. Lenders pour over account statements questioning deposits and checks written, then require a “letter of explanation”.
If my sister pays me cash for something or other, that cash is going right back out at the grocery store or at the bank to make the car payment.
Nobody’s business if my sister owes me money, or vice versa.
Ever gone out to eat with a group of twenty-somethings? The government doesn’t need to design a cashless society. It will move there on its own. If one extensively buys online (as do I), cash isn’t even an option.
There are a lot of things governments do that they don’t need to do.
That’s the biggest problem.
Best count me among the chumps, I guess, since I’m not a drug dealer. But not many people carry vast sums of cash. I generally have around $100 on me. If I get robbed, I’m out $100. Big whoop. The privacy is worth it.
Poor naive youths
They’ll learn once they experience their first bank-wide ATM malfunction
Oh dear. Seriously, Ricochet?
I think we should trust the government that allowed 20 million people’s records to be hacked. It will take care of us.
Credit cards are not dependent on ATMs.