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Why We Should Fear A Cashless World (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Dominic Frisby writes with a very interesting, albeit heavily opinionated, article from The Guardian discussing why we should all fear a cashless world. He argues "it will hand yet more power to the financial sector in that banks and related fintech companies will oversee all transactions." Every payment you will make will be traceable. While inequality is already a problem, it may be exacerbated even further in a cashless society. Frisby writes, "Cash, on the other hand, empowers its users. It enables them to buy and sell, and store their wealth, without being dependent on anyone else. They can stay outside the financial system, if so desired."
I guess it's going to be back to Barter World...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
You know, actually anonymous instead of pseudo-not-really anonymous.
Design suggestions?
Pointers to existing "bitcoin 2.0 the actually anonymous version" projects?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If you give government a power, it will use it -- for its own purposes. Government is a business that makes money for its employees by inventing new ways to control you. Sure, it sounds like guy who lives in a van down by the river talk. The media and the $200k per year professors disagree. But history is clear on this: government serves itself, in the name of your best interests. Be cautious :)
Cashless society means that Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx can impose sales tax on everyone in form of transaction fees.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/sta...
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Slashdot's "Digital" category was actually created for stories related to the Digital Equipment Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation hence the icon.
Maybe the category needs to be retired, or given the number of stories that have erroneously had it applied to them, maybe the icon need to be changed.
Carefully consider the trade offs is more accurate.
As with most changed they are new problems that needs to be minimized and benefits to take advantage of.
Stories love to use fear. Real life is more boring and more able to plan and control.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Using paper money, backed by nothing, certainly requires a financial system.
Why would you use the DEC logo for this ...
Cash is worthless paper with numbers printed on it. While not as traceable as cashless transactions, cash itself is not wealth. I've got a $100,000,000,000,000 Trillion Zimbabwe note to prove it.
Yes, that is true.
However, if you think that a bar of gold has value and paper money doesn't, then you clearly have no idea how money actually works.
You know that cash value changes over time. Its value does not depend on gold reserves anymore. In the case of a zombie apocalypse or stock market crash, cash paper might become as valuable as toilet paper. Do you remember this African country, Zimbabwe? Its paper money became useless, so useless they had trillion dollar bills printed. So it is not a good idea to keep cash forever.
You don't need that. Which was why gold was popular.
Testing the purity of gold coins was relatively simple chemistry.
Check the density first, then dip it in acid.
Operation Choke Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is an illustration of what can happen. Porn actors, gun auctioneers, and other people that the government didn't like, suddenly found themselves denied bank accounts. The government's flimsy excuse was that these *MIGHT* be doing something illegal. This is on par with the IRS going after conservative non-profits.
At least for now, people can still put cash under their matresses. Even so, the police often seize cash from individuals carrrying large amounts. But imagine what happens when there is no cash option. You can't get paid because you have nowhere to deposit your "money".
Just because you're not a porn actor, or gun auctioneer, doesn't mean you're safe. "First they came for the porn actors, but I wasn't a porn actor... etc". Be very, very afraid.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I'm cynical... if we go to a cashless society, it will wind up being a society like a caste system or a royal/peasant system, similar to Saudi Arabia where a prince can have someone picked off the street and drawn/quartered at will.
Back in the Middle Ages, cash was an equalizer. A gold coin from a peasant was worth just as much as one handed from the Pope or the reigning King. Without this, it is quite likely we will fall back to this type of system, perhaps using DNA testing to check how pure-blooded someone is to see if they get a round of steak and lobster, or if they get to starve that night.
You HAVE to have a resource distribution system. There is only so many resources to go around, and Malthus is something that can be delayed, but never denied. So, pick your way to see who eats and who doesn't. Money is one way. Status in the Party is another. Rank and land titles is another way. There is one widget, and two people who want/need it. Pick the method to see who gets it and who doesn't. Communism has failed. Capitalism has failed as well.
Choose wisely.
I don't know any transsexual hookers who take bitcoin.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Isn't cash similarly not-really anonymous though? Each bank note has a unique serial number on it which could easily be scanned and recorded with modern technology making transactions pseudo-anonymous if businesses were required to scan the notes for each transaction and banks record the notes you withdraw etc. Of course that would not cover everything but it would probably cover enough that authorities could use it to track people in. This makes it similar to bitcoin in that tracking the currency takes some effort but is not impossible.
When we have a cashless society we have slavery. Anyone who has deposited an out of town check has already discovered that you don't have the money right away. Oh, the bank where you deposited it has it that night. But you can't have it for up to 10 working days. This is called the "float". Banks "float" huge sums of money daily - your money - and lend it back to you and others at exorbitant interest rates. The banks, of course, keep those (up to 29% annually of the amount borrowed) interest collections. You can already, in the USA, transfer money only 10 times per month in the USA - even between your own accounts at the same bank. So already, you don't own your money and can't do with it what you please. You earned it. You've already paid taxes on your earning, but you still don't actually own what's left to do with as you please. You have restrictions on how much you can draw at a time etc. etc. Your money can be confiscated, blocked from usage and be divided by 1,000 overnight. Just ask anyone who lives in Argentina. You can literally go to bed a wealthy person, having worked fervently and saved your whole life, and wake up in the morning where every $100 you had in the bank is now only 10 cents. When your money is *completely* controlled electronically you are at the mercy of your government and the banks. Totally. You are effectively a hostage, if not a slave. I know, I've lived it already.
The one nice thing about the 'cashless economy' is that(unlike a great many awful ideas) both its backers and its detractors actually largely agree on the reasons for why it will be awesome/awful; they just phrase them slightly differently. More commonly you have to deal with one or both sides fundamentally disagreeing on what the effects of the plan will be, which requires you to sort out the fact of the matter, rather than just disagreeing on whether the effects are good or not.
The enthusiasts say "Hooray, saving the un-banked from their precarious existence and enabling access to financial services!" The detractors say "feeding the last holdouts and previously inaccessible markets into the maw of the financial service industry." They aren't actually disagreeing. The enthusiasts talk about the glorious transparency and ability to crack down on bribery, embezzlement, slush funds, and various similar things. The pessimists note the relentless and inescapable scrutiny and the ability to crack down on basically any flavor of transaction you don't much approve of. Again, not really a dispute over what the plan will do. Optimists extol the ease and convenience of frictionless electronic transacting without tedious stacks of paper. The less sanguine note that that's pretty much exactly what team Behavioral Econ says is the recipe to maximize impulse spending and consumer debt accumulation.
None of this is news to me. None of it is a surprise. I've seen the writing on the wall since the late 90's. All I want to know is why the category icon for this article is a proportionally mangled copy of the old D.E.C. logo?
i mean, that is how it was done for thousands of years
Any given system over time is only going to be reconfigured over time to favor those with power. By those with power. In capitalism, power being money.
This drift may be too subtle to notice, but it's obvious if you ponder the effect's foundation, not the effect's subtlety.
I'm not trying to be moralistic, even the benefactors may be unaware in cases where it's just a natural consequence of the imbalance.
This same line of reasoning identifies that giving more/all control to the financial services (banks) will see drift from the lopsided influence, the only debatable point being how much.
I don't know if that's real, but I actually have a 50Billion Yugoslavian dinar bill that has the picture of Nikolai Tesla on it. I have it right here. During the troubles there, they had bills going up to 500,000,000 dinar.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The fundamental problem is the "scourge" of crime.
Unfortunately, we're in a state of Industrial level crime: from cartels, to terrorism, to state sponsored shenanigans.
Most of these cash free laws aim at abetting crime. Cashless laws are supposed to stifle money laundering, ransoms, drug payments, gun payments, etc.
Anonymous transactions enable criminal transactions.
But free societies need to allow for crime, especially low grade crime. Nobody wants cartels, or terrorist groups, or even state sponsored shenanigans. But I do want to be able to pay people under the table for painting my fence. Or buying some weed on the street corner. Or buying a stolen stereo from the back of somebodies van.
With the pervasive surveillance society, we can't prevent crime, but we can post-mortem hunt down the perpetrators. We can run the tape back. Watch the guy with the knife walk backwards out of the convenience store in to his car. The car drive backwards down the street. The broken window suddenly reassembling itself as the guy pulls the hammer out of it and walks backward to the back alley, where he rides his bicycle backwards to his house.
But, we've been solving petty crimes like that forever using classic detective work and simply relying on people being people, and criminals being stupid.
That pervasive surveillance that nailed this guy with a mouse click is so oppressive as to stifle the real creativity of society. The growth of society. The change of society.
Adding money transfer tracking just broadens the net.
Cartels and terrorism are social issues, not criminal issues. It's a different category of ill. But pervasive surveillance, is worse.
"That is how it was done for thousands of years" is one of the worst arguments you could make for doing something. Especially on a tech site. 0/10.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
NIRP = Negative Interest Rates, a situation where a central bank tries to push interest rates below zero (instead of getting interest on your savings, you pay the bank to hold your cash). The theory is that THIS is the thing that will force consumers to spend their wealth, and yadda yadda, the economy starts growing and adding jobs (the reason for the 2% inflation target is similar, to make debt more attractive as one can pay it off in less valuable currency, and to institute a "use it or lose it" tax which doesn't need to be voted on by the legislature).
The PROBLEM is that if rates get too negative, then people will convert their wealth to cash. Large denomination bills enable that. That's why there has been a push on to eliminate the 100 dollar bill, under the guise of battling terrorists and criminals. The head of the European Central Bank has recently proposed eliminating the 500 Euro note for the same reason. A happy coincidence is that this makes it harder for people to convert their wealth to cash.
This won't be instituted all at once. This is how it is introduced, under a false casus belli.
A cashless society means you are a captive audience to these sorts of experiments. Additionally, while cash doesn't require infrastructure to complete transactions, cashless transactions require a great deal of infrastructure. Buying something electronically means you are requesting permission to buy - either via authentication or other constraints.
Humans have been using currency for thousands of years. Instead of hastily rushing to do away with it, we should approach the situation with a lot of caution. Something proponents most certainly do not want.
Currency is already a logical construct. The slips of paper are inherently worth very little. They don't even function that well as toilet paper (not that I would know). Currency which becomes an electronic logical construct gives a tremendous amount of power to the people running the servers. And even more importantly perhaps, their cronies.
Neither precious metals nor paper money have any intrinsic value. They only have value be we have decided to give them value.
Precious metals have one good 'intrinsic' quality: they can be traded as an alternative to any/all paper monies. But the overall value is still psychological and trading is still regulated, so that distinction is not so grand as goldbugs like to think.
The thing that would worry me about a switch back to gold would be constraining the amount of money in the economy to the amount of gold in circulation. I think that would turn gold into a really really expensive form of currency. Like an ounce would have to be worth millions, or at least much more than it is worth currently.
Here it comes mutherphukers....the Mark of the Beast
And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Revelation 13:15-17
Web pages will take forever to load, not to mention my memory latency will shoot through the roof!
Because I will no longer be able to supplement my income by picking up pennies dropped on the pavement.
This article is very US Centric and ignores many facts and counterpoints, one of which is Canada, which is already a cashless society for all intents and purposes (were down to only 44% of transactions using cash and it falls by roughly 10% a year). Furthermore it makes the assumption that a cashless society incurs costs on the poor, when that is only true in the USA where undertaking of the poor is an epidemic and Visa and Mastercard have a vice grip on the debit card industry, charging high fees for merchants and consumers. Thesent are US specific problems, not problems with cashless societies in general.
Gold bug or not, if money became worthless or too restrictive people would find other ways. Unleaded gas, beans, rice, canned goods, there are a host of items that are as good as if not better than gold and which could easily be used to determine value. A cow will cost you 1000 cans of vegetable or 300 gallons of gas. Sure, not as convenient as saying $800 but still very workable in a pinch. A can of vegetables or a gallon of gas has a very know value to virtually everyone.
Payroll robberies" were a thriving industry when I started my working life in the 70's, electronic transfers have eliminated that risk and reduced insurance premiums, so good luck finding an employer who pays your wage in cash rather than direct deposit into your bank account.
James Cagney's "White Heat" begins with a train robbery of all things and ends in a botched payroll robbery. Even in 1949, Cody Jarrett was an anachronism, a dead man walking.
Reality check. You believe that paying with a credit card does not cost more than cash? You may not see the cost as it may be charged to the store instead of you, but you pay in higher prices for all goods and services. In fact you not only pay higher costs for all goods and services because of a card, you pay for the theft on all of those insured cards.
If the banks did not make money from cards do you think you would get them for free? How do you think they make money on those cards without collecting service fees that you pay for? Those are rhetorical questions, don't continue to prove PT Barnum correct.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
10 days, try depositing a check in the US that is from Canada, it took 30 days to get the cash in the account.
Hell, Paypal was faster.
Using paper money, backed by nothing, certainly requires a financial system.
The gold bar at Fort Knox weighs about thirty pounds. Even in more manageable form, coin or bullion isn't practical for anything but the simplest of transactions. You need vaults, you need guards and armored couriers. You need standards of weight and measure.
You need stability --- which means at the very least that someone has to regulate the amount of gold in circulation.
The 1869 Black Friday financial panic in the United States was caused by the efforts of Jay Gould and James Fisk to corner the gold market on the New York Gold Exchange. It was one of several scandals that rocked the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. When the government gold hit the market, the premium plummeted within minutes and many investors were ruined. Fisk and Gould escaped significant financial harm.
Cornering The Market
The trouble is...
* Who is going to buy a $500,000 house with cash - who is going to be stupid enough to hide that kind of money under the mattress?
* Transporting large sums of cash around is great for criminals.
* Physical money isn't secure - applying ink to paper is something that is going to get increasingly easy as technology improves and stamping out disks of metal isn't happening because it's hard to do it cheaply enough to profitably with =$1 coins.
* Physical money is still backed by someone - it only works so long as there is widespread confidence in the stuff.
OK...so maybe gold...
* Who will actually want gold when the zombie apocalypse happens?
* The value of gold versus the things you need (food/water/power/shelter) is horribly variable.
* For most informal/low-quantity transactions, it's too easy to fake.
OK...so maybe something people actually need?
* You can't "save" most kinds of food.
* Water is bulky and heavy to exchange.
* Power can't be transported in ANY convenient manner.
* Shelter can't be traded in small quantities.
OK...so how about the "barter" system?
* Fine, so you have the ability to write a bunch of custom software, the farmer who has the food doesn't need custom software. You'd have to put together a chain of 20 to 30 people who want to barter simultaneously just to buy a loaf of bread.
All of this means that we need something that's very much like money - and it needs to be more abstract than physical coins and notes. If it's abstract then we have to trust the people who issue it and look after it. Those people don't work for nothing - so we end up needing to pay them in some manner. WIth bitcoin, for example, the miners administer the system - and we "pay" them by allowing them to increase the money supply - which in a large economy would mean that a gradual increase in money supply would increase inflation and result in us paying them in the decreasing value of our savings.
A *modest* credit card fee wouldn't be such a terrible thing - but all the time we fall for "Airline miles", "Cash-back" and crap-knows-what schemes that come along with them - we aren't getting a lower rate. If everyone picked their credit card strictly according to the lowest interest rate - then they'd be forced to compete on that criterion alone - and the rates would come down.
www.sjbaker.org
You WILL embrace it. For it is written, for it is done. You can toss all the hunnerd dolla bills at your monitor all you want. Amazon won't send you shit.
Platinum
It has more uses than gold, especially in chemical reactions..
Cashless society make several crimes no longer feasible, provided it is done with traceable transactions, not anonymous ones like bit coin. Bank robbery? A little silly if it involves transferring credits from the banks account to the criminal's account, doesn't it?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Banks compete with each other and have to please me to keep my business. The real danger is the government. It already forces banks to snitch on customers, will gleefully confiscate "suspiciously large" amounts of cash, and are already talking about eliminating large bills to further discourage you from using cash.
While folks are up in arms about the FBI, the real threat to privacy is the taxman... Can never buy yourself enough civilization, can you?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
For years /. and many other sites people kept extolling the virtues of a cashless society. Even now if you read all of the comments.
So many comments and so few mentions of the mark of the beast?
What people value in money is the ability to spend it as they wish. A cashless economy removes this freedom. This will drive people to seek other means of trade. Expect barter, silver, gold, bit-coin, soup cans, laundry detergent bottles, whatever.
I heard some people discuss alternative currencies on late night talk radio not too long ago and the expert they had brought up several means to bypass reserve notes and coins. The topic was not on a cashless society exactly but more generally about the value we place in government issued money.
One thing mentioned in this talk show was the potential use of currency from another country. There are laws already existing in the USA protecting the right of people to keep foreign bank notes. For a cashless society to work then laws like this would have to be repealed to prevent people from just using Euros or whatever, not that it'd prevent it completely but it would drive it underground.
As mentioned in the article there's just too many transactions where electronic transfers just aren't suitable. There's a lot of charities and such that live on small cash transactions, we even have a name for them, "a penny drive".
Oh, and the biblical reference to a mark of the beast will cause a problem with a lot of people.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Just imagine that the economy collapses, similar to 2008, but without the bailout.
Your money isn't worth anything.
The effect of the bailout and QE was to lower the value of money. They were designed, in part, to prevent a deflationary cycle. So, "without the bailout" your money would be worth more.
That's not an intrinsic property. It depends on people deciding to value them.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Right now we are advising all our clients to put everything they've got into canned food and shotguns.
This signature is false.
This isn't a theoretical, academic problem. In 2013, the Cyprus government made a shock announcement, stating that they would be taking a "one-off" 'bailout levy' of 10% from any accounts over a certain balance value. Article on BBC News here:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl... This was proposed because Cyprus, like Greece, had a failing economy and owed the European Central Bank some $13 Billion as part of a loan repayment. The economy was tanking, the government didn't have the tax revenue, so they decided to go after the savers. The really wealthy in Greece kept their money off-shore and were not hit, but ex-pats from other EU nations could have been hammered if this went through. The interesting thing was that before the proposal was announced the Cypriot government put rules in place to prohibit people withdrawing their cash [since that would have started a run on the banks]. We should not underestimate the danger of this proposal.
Cute, but I think you know this isn't accurate. The worst thing that can happen to any currency is rampant deflation. It serves to make it useless, just like rampant *in*flation, but the impact is even worse. When there's not enough money supply to service incomes and day to day transactions the entire economy of labor shuts down, potentially overnight. Add that to the fact that most of the world pegs the value of their currency (either directly or indirectly) to the US dollar and you'll understand why the bailout wasn't an option, it was a necessity. Once you understand that, then you should understand why nearly every political issue up for debate should be taking a back seat to monetary policy and banking reform.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
A cashless world makes bribes much harder, drug dealing much harder, and the billions of dollars evading child support much more likely to actually go to child support.
When laws get in the way we should be fixing the laws, but cash is mostly about avoiding the laws, which means having cash generally punishes people who follow the law. Avoiding being tracked for privacy reasons is probably less than one millionth of the cash spent in the country.
Cash works then the network / Pay Station / is down.
One day I was trying to get gas and when to a few stations just to hear the our system is down / our system for X card is down. Also what about times where the stores internet is down and they don't have dial up CC readers?
How many payment systems are setup for store and send later other then places that can fall back to Manual Credit Card Processing.
stored value cards have issues with cloning and most metro systems are moving off of them.
There is no need to charge a direct service fee for credit card purchases. In the US, businesses and banks hid this long ago so the fees behave much like a tax. Store estimates 200 card transactions/week and the bank charges the business 2.00 per. So the cost of everything gets elevated to cover the 400.00 that is going to the bank.
That it is not called out as a separate line item on the customers bill does not mean that the bank is not making money on every transaction and that _everyone_ is paying additional fees to cover the difference. We are also paying for fraud on those same types of transactions, but they hide those costs too. Marketing people are not stupid, and if people saw these fees and how much fraud they paid to cover they would potentially not use the cards.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Even cash has issues with cloning.
Otherwise I agree that when the systems are down you might be able to pay with cash, however many shops here in Sweden can't even take cash when the systems are down since every transaction has to be securely logged and then sent to the tax authorities. The cash registers used have to be approved by the tax authorities as well.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Quick, somebody teach all the hole in the wall cash only restaurants we know and love to use ring signature based alternative cryptocurrencies. /s
Staying outside of the financial system has no actual benefit. Your sock drawer or mattress can't get interest. Even the 1% use financial institutions because if your money is not in the system, it's not working for you.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Right now we are advising all our clients to put everything they've got into canned food and shotguns.
Time to corner the market on can-openers and shotgun shells, I guess.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Found the gold bug!
Remind me again, was it the Illuminati or the Lizard Men who took us off the Gold Standard?
Which ones run the banks?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
The worst thing that can happen to any currency is rampant deflation.
How do you make rampant deflation? The only easy way how to make deflation is to deleverage. And the biggest leverage at the company scale is around 15. At the macro scale what it could be? Maybe 2 or 3? So your rampant deflation is at most deflated 3 times. And it will not happen overnight either. On the other side one can print paper money without limit. Money was inflated 15 times in Germany in the second half of 1922. That is at macro economy scale. Not a one pitiful company. And you want to indicate that deflation is more dangerous than inflation. When inflation can be run without limit while it is very hard to run deflation much?
This idea was part of the plot of Margaret Atwood's excellent The Handmaid's Tale.
The story is about a post war world in which fertility has plummeted due to the use of chemical weapons (I think), and the US is now run by an ultra-conservative christian authoritarian government (think a Christian version of Saudi Arabia), and the limited number of fertile women are essentially "breeders" (the Handmaids of the title), slaves who bare children for the ruling elite. It's a fantastic dystopian novel.
The authoritarian regime that controls the US in the story did away with cash. Then at a later point they simply suspended women's access to any kind of payment system. Without recourse to cash they were utterly powerless. I've always felt The Handmades Tale was a far scarier book than 1984 (which is also great), because it seemed much more plausible, especially as such societies essentially already exist.
Unlike some of her other books, The Handmaid's Tale is a short and quick read, well worth an evening or two.
Paul Leader
That would be their daddy's P-38. Or the can opener on each of their many multi-tools, or just use one of their many big knives. Demand for can-openers not likely to be as high as you expect.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
It's been claimed the minute cash is made illegal the bank will give you a negative interest rate on your account.
Maybe , maybe not, but one thing is clear: it does mean another shift in power, and it's not a shift in our favor.
You don't need a can opener, just a rough surface like (relatively smooth) concrete, or even a smooth stone. Rub the top of the can on it until you wear through the outer layer of crimped over metal and the lid pops right off. Just sayin'...
parent post
So your rampant deflation is at most deflated 3 times. And it will not happen overnight either.
gp post
When there's not enough money supply to service incomes and day to day transactions the entire economy of labor shuts down, potentially overnight.
Not sure you read the GP correctly. If what you said is about deflation happening overnight, then the GP said the economy of labor shuts down overnight. See the differences?
Which ones run the banks?
Yup. That one.
The US has been spending *billions* to continue to mint sub-worthless pennies because we can't stand to part with them. We continue to print $1 paper bills LONG after it's been successfully proved by other Western commercial societies that 1-unit, 2-unit, and even 5-unit coins make far more sense.
Do you seriously think we're going to "get rid of cash" generally (for sensible or malignant reasons, take your pick) when we're the currency-equivalent of irrational hoarders?
-Styopa
It's not like the government would ever make it illegal to own water, don't think about it too much. It already passed us, and soon we will be up to our necks in contamination. Dune, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not even counting the DCL/inflation they already have, just slightly less of a fine to use a bank. But what about the fee's then, ..........
You didn't read the post you replied to or didn't understand it. You and he both managed to say that cash must be accepted for payment of debts. What you apparently didn't get was the part where he said that cash can be refused as payment for goods and services. If someone refuses a sale on whatever grounds, that doesn't mean that either of you owe each other anything. If you walk into a store trying to buy something, and they don't take cash, and you walk out with whatever goods, you would be arrested for theft. Please test this theory if you don't believe it. Alternately you can read what the Treasury has to say about it.
It WORKED for thousands of years.
For suitable definitions of "worked". Personally, I don't want a monetary system that "works" that well.
You make rampant deflation with human psychology. When institutional banks fail, they have too large a contribution in the money creation cycle. They call in all loans, stop generating new loans, and the entire banking system follows suit; a credit freeze. Investors and business people know the impacts of a credit freeze means spiralling deflation so they close the door and shut off everything. Asset values plummet. You might think "fine, but prices and wages just scale downwards to compensate for the reduced money supply", but this isn't the case. Humans are not rational and our psychology does not work that way. The end result is that you can't buy or sell a thing until the spiral is controlled. This is what happened in 1929, and many times before that. It's the reason for the central bank and central bank policies. The only option is to inflate the the currency to offset. Could the government have let the banks fail and bailed out the economy through cash injections in social programs, infrastructure spending, etc? Maybe, but the government doesn't actually control the central bank. It's a private institution run by a private banking cartel. If they fail, it does too.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Cute, but I think you know this isn't accurate. The worst thing that can happen to any currency is rampant deflation. It serves to make it useless, just like rampant *in*flation, but the impact is even worse. When there's not enough money supply to service incomes and day to day transactions the entire economy of labor shuts down, potentially overnight. Add that to the fact that most of the world pegs the value of their currency (either directly or indirectly) to the US dollar and you'll understand why the bailout wasn't an option, it was a necessity. Once you understand that, then you should understand why nearly every political issue up for debate should be taking a back seat to monetary policy and banking reform.
The bailouts may have been necessary but the methodologies around them were poor bordering on criminal.
The companies that had to be bailed out should have been nationalized on the basis of the money for the bailout constituting purchase of interest in the company and then later re-privatized once the market had stabilized with any capital gain going towards the cost of the bailouts. If there were eventual capital loss we the taxpayers wouldn't be any worse off than we already are as we had to carry the whole cost anyway.
Those running the companies should certainly not have been paid bonuses and allowed to go on with their 1% lives while we taxpayers alone foot the bill and if the value of the bailed out companies had tanked, from the investor standpoint, then those executives would have gotten what they deserved - a boot in the ass on their way out the door.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Found the gold bug!
Remind me again, was it the Illuminati or the Lizard Men who took us off the Gold Standard?
This is lame. Why do you assume that advocates of hard currency believe in lizard men? While I don't support going back to the Gold Standard (too restrictive) it is not a completely unreasonable position. It's not on the level of believing in lizard men from outer space.
And it was Nixon who took us off the Gold Standard.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I couldn't agree more. I would add that during the process you described, the government should have made it their first priority to correct the issues in monetary policy that caused this. Not through regulations and increased bureaucracy but through identifying the systemic causes and creating policy to correct the root of the problem. The ultimate conclusion would have been nationalizing the central bank and money creation process through a slow but steady increase of the fractional reserve requirement. The central bank could then have exclusive "new money" lending rights by maintaining a central credit database, and registering private banks as brokers of new money loans instead of creators.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Nixon and FDR.
Oh, you weren't serious? Shut up, and let the adults speak.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This reminds me of what my mother (an otherwise sweet and kind woman) used to say, every time the conversation turned to the greedy people at the top:
"Lock them all in one room with ONE KNIFE."
The point being that their greed and lust for power will cause them to constantly fight over that one KNIFE till there is only one of them left. And hopefully he will die from his injuries.
Agree 100%. In a cashless society, money will just be used as another way to surveil people's lives and profile them. It's already pretty bad, if I for instance went 100% cash transactions for everything (which is still technically possible) I'd be flagged as a potential criminal/terrorist because they can't 'see' what I'm doing with my money -- and that is completely and totally wrong.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Thank you. Finally a voice of reason to help people understand that Nixon was a reptilian!
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
True but let's not forget Roosevelt and Breton Woods which effectively took us off the gold standard. Nixon ended the facade.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Deflation happens when there is not enough disposable income to support prices. This happened during the early 1930's during the great depression when unemployment was rampant and there were no "safety net" programs. FDR was able to stimulate the economy with programs such as the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and the NRA (National Recovery Act) which put men to work doing public works projects. The economy didn't truly rebound until WW2 when idle factories were put to work producing materials for the war.
We are in a similar situation today, except that we have social programs and instead of no jobs, many good paying jobs are being replaced by low-paying part time work. Easy credit has allowed certain sectors of the economy to jump up in price (Student Loans, Housing, etc.), but eventually the loans will come due and the piper must be paid. So far the piper has been paid by expanding the national debt (4 Trillion in 2000, almost 19 Trillion now), but eventually that train will be derailed. A boat load of cash may have been created in these last 10 years, but it has not gone to the middle class to stimulate the overall economy.
Beware of Sleestak
It is actually a completely unreasonable position. No government will ever return to using commodity money. Some discussions of the issue here, here, and here. Probably any number of textbooks cover the issue as well.
Generally, just being subject to (large) volatility having nothing to do with the actual need for money for exchanges is a bad enough trait to disqualify it, without getting into any other issues. Anyone who is willing to ignore the problems with commodity money is put into the position of needing some alternate explanation for its abandonment by one and all. A conspiracy theory of some sort is a requirement; the exact form is immaterial. Lizard men are only slightly sillier than Rothschilds (Rothschildren?), Illuminati, Bilderbergs, Jews, or whichever other group our gold bug decides to blame: a difference of degree, not character.
All other justifications aside, I sure as shit don't need to pander to any given worldview in the context of a joke.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
This is why most preppers collect "junk" or Constitutional silver. It's a lot easier to handle day-to-day small transactions because it's recognizable and hard to inflate. Gold is for storing long-term wealth, not buying milk and bread.
Note that I agree with Bill Still wrt monetary reform. But in a post collapse scenario, silver will be king along with alcohol, cigs medical supplies and knowledge and anything of actual use. Search shtfplan.com for Bosnia. That's how it'll prolly turn out, assuming no large-scale nuke warfare.
In a total collapse, people *might* accept silver but I'm not sure constitutional silver is going to do you any good. The average person can't tell the difference between a silver quarter and the silver plated coins we have today and even if they can, what makes you think anyone will trust it more than the money that just collapsed? Sure, you can make arguments all day long but I'm not sure it's a sure thing as it's still just symbolic and has no real use in the day to day. On the other hand, gasoline, food, ammunition, and medicine are useful in any scenario. My first gut reaction is to figure out how to create antibiotic ointment in my basement as this would be a very valuable skill. This, however, only works in a stationary scenario where people trust or can see that your antibiotics actually work and you're not selling snake oil. Hundreds of pounds of food is also problematic if you're on the move. For price/weight ammunition would probably be one of the most valuable but is a very fixed supply and very hard to manufacture without a bunch of heavy equipment. Skills and physical labor are about the only highly portable currency that are a sure thing. The best thing is to stay in one place where you can gain trust from your neighbors and stockpile food and don't have to worry about portability. If I was going to be a prepper, I would try to find a way to have a 3 year rotating stock of canned goods, gasoline, and ammunition and forget about gold/silver. After that, I would try to acquire the skills for creating gun powder, reloading shells, and creating basic antibiotics and other commonly needed medicines in my basement. Oh, and gardening skills.
Paper money actually has a lot of shortcoming for the users - theft, forgery, arbitrary inflation. Even if cash was solving privacy problems effectively, it can not be used to buy anything online. Since you have to show up for every transaction, your risks of getting photographed, detained or simply mugged are much higher than when money is exchanged over Internet.
We should be embracing technology and using it to solve privacy and stable value problems rather than going luddite. Bitcoin is only the first attempt at cryptocurrency and we can learn from its problems to develop something robust enough for mainstream use.
You missed one major difference between the two and it's very very important: Business operates via voluntary transactions. Government operates by diktat and force
That affects both how they operate as well as the outcomes they produce.
Anyone who is willing to ignore the problems with commodity money is put into the position of needing some alternate explanation for its abandonment by one and all. A conspiracy theory of some sort is a requirement; the exact form is immaterial. Lizard men are only slightly sillier than Rothschilds (Rothschildren?), Illuminati, Bilderbergs, Jews, or whichever other group our gold bug decides to blame: a difference of degree, not character.
All other justifications aside, I sure as shit don't need to pander to any given worldview in the context of a joke.
Actually, if you look into the history of the Rothchilds, Rockefellers, Warburgs, heck even the Bushes and Pierces, the idea that they coordinate on a large scale for their own advantage is not nearly as silly as lizard men. The Bilderberg group was considered a "conspiracy theory" until very recently, after all. Whether any of them had anything to do with our leaving the Gold Standard is quite another matter, of course.
That said, you sure as shit don't need to cater to my world view in your humor. It just indicates to me what you take seriously and what you don't.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I couldn't agree more. I would add that during the process you described, the government should have made it their first priority to correct the issues in monetary policy that caused this. Not through regulations and increased bureaucracy but through identifying the systemic causes and creating policy to correct the root of the problem. The ultimate conclusion would have been nationalizing the central bank and money creation process through a slow but steady increase of the fractional reserve requirement. The central bank could then have exclusive "new money" lending rights by maintaining a central credit database, and registering private banks as brokers of new money loans instead of creators.
Or undoing changes to existing laws that were set up to protect against this kind of nonsense to start with.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
"Why We Should Fear A Cashless World"
If you have to have this explained to you, you're probably too dumb to understand it.
Yes, it's all about anonymity and autonomy. Every government's wet-dream is to be able to track every transaction no matter how small.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The "conspiracy" part of these financial conspiracies is the silly/unnecessary element. It doesn't require collusion for one rich and powerful person to enact some change which will help other rich and powerful men, merely self-interest. It's generally substantially easier to get laws enacted which benefit a class to which you belong than laws which enrich yourself personally. Postulating a conspiracy generally adds little or no explanatory power, especially in the (typical) case where you conspire to do what you would have done anyway.
As far as the gold-based currencies are concerned, they seem to have been dropped repeatedly during war-time. Governments needed lots more money, but couldn't dig up a bunch of gold in a hurry. Going back to a gold standard would have lost a vital element of monetary control, and indeed, of sovereignty.
As an aside, Panama uses the US dollar as their currency. Technically it's the Balboa, and it's just pegged to the dollar, but they only mint Balboa coins; all their banknotes come from the US. Many Panamanians resent the past and current US influence in their country's affairs, and take this out on tourists. In my experience, when an irate Panameño is telling you to "Get out of my country!", digging a greenback out of your wallet and looking at it in an astonished manner is very communicative but still a bad idea.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
So, did you get that rant from a Federal Reserve executive or a random crack-addled homeless man off the street?
Deflation means the money you have is worth more, not less. Do you really think that giving money to the same people who gambled it all away in the first place is going to make the economy better? If so then you are a complete fool. They only way to fix such a financial crisis is to let the banks fail, hold the shareholders personally accountable, any "stimulus" has to be given to the people who lost their money to the banks, and then break up any remaining large banks.
If you have any criticisms of this method Iceland would like to have a word with you.
...without electricity. Having experienced one-week blackouts in a major cities after hurricanes and ice-storms, I can tell you that without cash you are royally screwed. Even the recent 2 day blackout in San Diego, California was enough to leave some people very hungry who could not buy food without cash. I was eating steak and using my stored gasoline to drive anywhere I wanted to go on empty streets.
And let the world economy that's dependant on the US banking cartel fend for themselves right? The problem is systemic. Even if "letting the banks fail" could fix the problem (it almost for sure couldn't, and would just make it worse) it's a scenario that's destined to repeat itself. It's time people stop fighting over which of the two laziest polar opposite approaches is best and actually think of real solutions.
An analogy I like is comparing the banking system to gangreen. While your solution of cutting off the limb certainly might work, it's not without repercussions. And as you know, there's ways to treat gangrene and keep all our limb in tact.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Not good enough. Our society has a problem assuming regulations and laws are the first solution, when they should always be the last. If you can fix a problem without creating an expensive, corruptable bureaucracy around it, shouldn't you do that instead?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Yeah and the left HATES empowered people so we'll probably all see cashless societies in Europe and North America.
You don't need a can opener, just a rough surface like (relatively smooth) concrete, or even a smooth stone. Rub the top of the can on it until you wear through the outer layer of crimped over metal and the lid pops right off. Just sayin'...
So the market will be in smooth concrete then?
Anyone who has deposited an out of town check
A check? what is this 1990?
I still have my last cheque (that's how we spell it here) book here, and the last cheque I used was in the 90's.
[something about ACs being easy to ignore/block]
[something about the effort put into #51759755]
[some other outrage to help further validate the trolling]
I'll keep trying to find more fucks to give, I'll probably find more motivation once I convince myself you're worth it.
if things get messy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not good enough. Our society has a problem assuming regulations and laws are the first solution, when they should always be the last. If you can fix a problem without creating an expensive, corruptable bureaucracy around it, shouldn't you do that instead?
Oh I didn't say it would work by itself but it certainly contributed to the instability that caused the latest round of bank bailouts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Policy by itself will never be sufficient - regulation is required. The reality is that both together are proving insufficient due to the power of lobbying and the corrupt who decide both policy and law.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
LOL! That ship sailed a long time ago. Have you ever tried to do that? Talk to one of your poorer friends that has no credit, and they will tell you how easy it is. Sure there is a bit of a grey market using cash for certain jobs and people, folks in the service industry and not claiming tips, and building contractors and the like accepting cash and having some creative accounting... but that is about it, and even they are not "outside" the financial system. Any large amount is very difficult to keep anywhere without being electronic. About the only example I can think of is if you invested just about everything into property, which would largely still be "paper" in that you would have deeds, are are physical things (or at least places) etc...
I'm not sure we will ever get away from cash, however even over the last decade or so, its use has dwindled, and likely that trend will continue until it is used only in a niche settings for say emergencies or something (remember travelers checks, does anyone still use those?)...