George Rebane
[This is the linked transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 2 March 2016.]
The next thing to become illegal will be our ability to pay for something with cash. Certain politicians in America are working hard to catch up with their European counterparts in outlawing transactions using that “ancient relic”. And it is all supposed to be for our own good.
Socialists and their central planning elites have that objective in mind since they will then enjoy unfettered freedom to tax everything and also control the buying and selling of everything. Politicians have hated cash for decades – first, because it makes confiscatory taxation impossible; second because cash enables hard-to-tax underground economies; and third, because it allows consumers to pay anonymously.
Corporatist banks support government efforts toward a cashless economy because then they can earn substantial fees on all electronic transactions, and more so when the government mandates the reporting of all transactions to the IRS, and other jurisdictions that tax and collect fees or fines. In the EU Denmark, Sweden, Greece, Italy, and France have quietly made the most headway. Denmark has the highest tax rates in Europe and therefore hosts a booming shadow economy. France and Italy have lowered the cash payment ban to €1,000, others are soon to follow. In Scandinavian countries the governments are already looking at people who like to pay cash as being suspect criminals or terrorists. Sweden will soon double down and start charging (negative) interest for keeping your money for you. Think about it, in a cashless society you have to keep all your money on someone’s government registered server where its comings and goings can be carefully watched. Bottom line, “If you are paying cash, something is wrong.”
Alongside this rush to comprehensive government monitored transactions is the fledgling electronic currency Bitcoin. Bitcoin supports anonymous transactions, and it is gaining ground around the world as another convenient alternative to cash. But governments are not far behind, since you will still need to keep you Bitcoin account with some trusted online repository, and into those, governments will sooner or later sink their hooks.
In the US banks are already filing routine SARs or Suspicious Activity Reports with the feds when you deposit or withdraw more than $5,000 in cash. And our Treasury is preparing to stop printing $100 bills and start removing them from circulation, thereby requiring five times more room in your mattress for storing your emergency stash of cash. It’s all done in the name of reducing crime since the C-note is the most popular bill in the world as legal and illegal tender. But the real problem we should all become aware of is the next big step in forfeiting another layer of privacy that further reduces our freedoms.
As the aim of gun control advocates is to eliminate all civilian ownership of firearms, so is the collectivists’ aim for complete state control of all economic activity. Making cash transactions first hard and then illegal is their easiest path outlined in such playbooks as Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s former head of his Orwellian named Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. That agency is charged with developing and implementing ways for government to slowly but firmly manipulate or nudge American society into compliant lifestyles deemed equitable, just, and sustainable by our progressive betters.
This social experiment hearkens back to the pseudo-science of eugenics promoted by progressives a century ago to improve mankind here and in Europe. Federal and state governments then introduced eugenics-designed programs that mandated nationwide birth control, abortion, and sterilization to unabashedly improve America’s breed. Today for some reason union schools no longer teach this chapter of our socialist history.
In a similar vein we may look forward to a time when, through cashless transactions, governments will track all of our income and purchases. And then using dynamic taxation, it will set prices on goods and services to automatically nudge us to how much of what we can or cannot buy with our credit and debit ‘cards’. Life will then be much simpler – no taxes to file, fees to pay, or wrong things to buy. It will all be managed automatically for the greater good. So what’s not to like about such a cashless world?
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[More background on the advancing cashless world can be obtained by googling ‘sunstein, cashless’, or reading the following postings from Stratfor and Cato.]
[4mar16 update] People all over the developed world have started stashing cash in response to more and more governments initiating negative interest rates and announcing plans to begin limiting its availability and eliminating its uses. The 4mar16 WSJ summarizes some of the global happenings (‘The New Cash Hoarders’) –
• High denomination notes are in great demand by people from Switzerland to Japan as a store of value – “cash hoarders are responding rationally to monetary policy”;
• Sales of safes for home storage are soaring;
• Former SecTreas Larry Summers calls for a global ban on notes worth more than $100;
• Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff one ups Summers by calling for a total ban on cash so that would allow central bankers to set negative interest rates without people “bailing out into cash”;
• Cash hoarding “lets people shield themselves from monetary policies that would force their savings into weak economies that can’t attract sufficient spending or investment on their own. These economies need reforms that boost incentives to work and invest, not negative interest rates and cash limits that raid the bank accounts of law-abiding citizens.”
Cash hoarding is yet one more clear lesson on the limits of quantitative easing and other forms of Keynesian monetary policies that call for ‘pump priming’ as opposed to growing the economy through lower taxes, liberalized labor laws, freer competition, among other reforms.
A prominent footnote to these worldwide realities is the progressives' abysmal ignorance of not only economics but current events reporting such economic behavior. Their left-leaning lamestream outlets are loath to report such failures of central planning, leading them to expose their intellectual deficits when they do run into sourcesnot among their vaunted outlets – e.g. RR – that report on such happenings. An example appears in the comment stream below where one such worthy even goes so far as to as to be astounded that I “would write a column in 2016 that express(es) concerns regarding cash”, and calls such a report as “something from the twilight zone of the past century.”
The manufacture of such products of the progressive intellect were foreseen by Lenin a hundred years ago – “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Under their tutelage for considerably more than four years, the Great Society schools have now given us a population that is finally ready to accept socialism about which to his followers in the west Vladimir Ilyich was unambiguously clear– “The goal of socialism is communism.” Today we can feel the Bern.
rebanesruminations.com 
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