Money in the bank does not get sent back into the economy at large.
Um, that's exactly what's happening when money is put in the bank. They don't keep it all as cash in vault, you know. That money is used to buy investments and make loans. (Even if they did just keep it in a vault, taking currency out of circulation would still return that value to the economy in the form of deflation.)
Wealth is production, so if there's 10% more stuff we need 10% more currency
You don't need 10% more currency; you just need the currency, in aggregate, to become 10% more valuable. Which will happen automatically through price adjustments without any change in the supply.
It's a dead language but, for some reason, it's been decided it's appropriate for the law.
It's preferred because it's a dead language. That means the grammar and vocabulary tend to remain stable over long periods of time, unlike living languages which are constantly mutating.
The only reason people don't expect this is because they don't understand how insurance actually works.
No, the ones that don't expect subsidies are exactly the ones that do understand how insurance actually works.
If you expect, up front, that you are going to be subsidizing other insurance clients, that means you're over-paying. You should be able to get a better rate from another insurance provider who sets premiums more fairly. So you defect, leaving the first insurer to either raise their rates for their remaining clients to be more in line with their expected costs or else go out of business. (The insurer certainly isn't going to fund any subsidy; they're in this to make a profit.) Competition thus naturally drives the level of subsidy down to zero.
If you're using modern health "insurance" as your model, you should be aware that this has been distorted by politics to the point that it barely resembles insurance at all. It has more in common with a social program (enforced "charity") than any other product commonly referred to as insurance. Key differences include bans on properly assessing risk and using that to determine premiums (e.g. with regard to pre-existing conditions) and mandates for individuals to buy the product whether they want it or not. The point of these rules is to introduce subsidies into a system where they would not exist naturally.
Yes, we can have insurance contracts between two parties with no risk pool, but without a risk pool the insurance industry would not exist.
I'm not contesting that, but it's completely irrelevant. For the most part the insurance industry depends on risk pools to control costs. Insurance does not. The context of the comment I was replying to was "In theory, the idea behind insurance...". Not the insurance industry. Critically, without risk pools the insurance industry could not exist as it does now, but it would still be possible to offer insurance at a profit. The cost would be much higher, of course, and it might not be something everyone buys, but you can get custom insurance now for things which don't fit neatly into any large risk pools. The presence or absence of risk pools does not change the nature of the insurance contract.
Your risk is partly (sometimes greatly, sometimes almost entirely, depending on the situation) is assessed based on the observed/assessed risk of the group(s) you belong to.
Naturally. As with most things, the more precisely they want to estimate your personal risk the more it will cost, so they use a reasonable approximation based on a set of factors they can easily measure. That's a far cry from charging everyone the same premiums or ignoring obvious known factors like pre-existing conditions which have a significant effect on expected cost.
If 5000 people buy insurance, but only 50 are likely to require a payout in a given period, as a group they can each pay less.
They're not each paying less. Both the group as a whole and the majority of the individuals in the group paid more, not less, as a result of buying insurance. At best you could say, in hindsight, that the minority who received payouts paid less than they would have without insurance (and thus were not left bankrupt) while the rest paid a bit more due to the premiums. However, when comparing the present cost of insurance against possible future events it's the expected cost of each that matters, and the expected cost of insurance (premiums) is higher than the expected cost of whatever you're insuring against, due to overhead.
You also seem to be assuming that the members of this group all have exactly the same risk profile. If 400 of the 5000 have an estimated 10% chance of requiring a payout and the remaining 4600 have a 0.2% chance, however—and they are all paying the same premiums—then 400 of them are paying less than their expected cost and 4600 are paying more. That is what I would consider "socialization of costs", or equivalently "externalization of costs". It's unsustainable unless you force the second group to participate, since otherwise they would defect and stop subsidizing the first group, at which point the insurer either raises their premiums or goes out of business. Nonetheless, it's the system politicians are currently trying to enforce in place of health insurance.
Getting back to the original topic, none of the above has any bearing on the fact that insurance has all the hallmarks of gambling, just with the intent of reducing your risk, whereas betting at a casino or the race tracks typically means exposing oneself to greater risk. The mechanism is exactly the same. If you're going to ban casino or sports betting in the name of protecting people from themselves, however, you might as well take that to its logical conclusion and ban all activity that involves taking risks...
Say for example there is a disease that can be treated through regular yet painful treatments at the cost of $1 million. There is a cure for the disease, with a one-time application that costs $1.5 million. Quantitatively the treatment course is the best option as it it cheaper. However, qualitatively, the cure is the best option as it reduces suffering.
Is it? How much suffering might be involved in producing that extra half-million dollars needed for the more expensive cure?
In theory, the idea behind insurance is socialized cost : spreading the cost of accidents across a wider population.
No, that absolutely is not what insurance is about. I can see why you'd think that, because that is what certain politicians are trying to turn medical insurance into, but actual insurance (everything non-medical, basically) involves paying a known amount, the premium, to an insurer in exchange for them taking on risk in your place. In a competitive market, the premium and the risk will have similar expected costs (cost of event times probability of event) with the difference being the insurer's administrative costs, capital expenses, and profit margin. The expected cost is not "socialized": No one buys insurance expecting up front to either subsidize other clients or be subsidized themselves. Everyone pays a premium in line with their own personal degree of risk.
The existence of a risk pool is what makes this a viable business proposition—the individual events may be hard to predict, but when an insurer combines a number of uncorrelated events together they get a fairly predictable aggregate expense, which means they can get by without holding enough capital in reserve to pay out on all their contracts simultaneously. However, that is strictly an internal detail of the insurance business and not a factor in the definition of insurance. It's still insurance even if we're just talking about a contract between two parties with no risk pool.
Yes, all insurance is gambling. Or to be more precise, it's counter-gambling—you're already gambling by involving yourself in an activity with some element of risk, and in buying insurance you're placing an opposing bet in order to cancel out some or all of that risk.
Say you're a participant in a horse race, for example. There is no qualitative difference between taking out insurance against the possibility of a loss and simply placing a bet for your opponent(s) to win. Either way you get a bit less if you win (the insurance premium or the amount of the bet) in exchange for receiving some prearranged payout in the event that you lose, thus reducing your risk.
Why... would it mean anything else than weight diminished by a factor of five?
Because if they'd meant that they would have said either "80% lighter than" or "one-fifth as heavy as". Phrases of the form "X times less than Y" (including "lighter than", "smaller than", etc.) are a literal translation of the formula "Y - (X * Y)" into natural language.
Unless perhaps you're defining "lightness" idiosyncratically as the reciprocal of weight, in which case "5 times lighter" really would equal "one-fifth as heavy". That's the difference between "X times as conductive" and "X times as resistive", because conductivity is defined as the reciprocal of resistance. Approximately no one actually thinks of "lightness" that way, however. (Quick check: Does "20% lighter" mean subtracting 20% of the weight, or adding 20% to the reciprocal of the weight? 80% as heavy, or 83% as heavy? Most would say the former.)
There's nothing wrong in principle with "20% thinner"; it means the original thickness reduced by 20%, or 80% as thick.
I agree that the other examples are nonsense, though. "Five times lighter" would be a negative weight (the original weight minus five times the original weight), and the same goes for "10 times slower". Unless they've figured out anti-gravity or time travel...
I assume that $2.7 trillion figure was based on total population, not adult population. The actual figures are around 230 million adults in the US and 130 million households, for $1.9 trillion annually or about $14,800 per household. Which is still a great deal of money.
This only tells us that it won't effect unemployment one way or the other compared to their control group.
No, it only tells us that it won't reduce unemployment. They never said that employment among the participants was on par with the control group—only that it wasn't higher. That leaves open the possibility that the participants had lower employment levels than the control group. Don't just assume that someone with an obvious investment in the success of the experiment would be up-front about negative results in an informal preliminary interview.
The test is "do people work less?" and even on this very limited test, the answer is no.
The article said no such thing. It said that some of the participants found work, and that they were not more likely to do so than the control group. While many people seem to be taking this for granted, the article never said that participants were just as likely to find work as the control group. The full results of the study will not be released until next year. My impression from the article was that they are admitting that they didn't get the results they wanted (more employment) but at least for now are avoiding the subject of just how much negative impact the experiment had on employment rates among the participants while attempting to refocus attention on other aspects like the participants' reported "happiness".
Regarding those who did get jobs: All the participants are well aware that this experiment won't last forever, so it makes sense to plan for what happens after it ends. How might that change under a true UBI, where they can count on receiving payments for the rest of their lives?
Authentication in blockchains is based on private keys, not "work". Short of brute-forcing the private key—which would undermine any cryptography-based system—no amount of processing will permit you to spend Bitcoins for which you don't already have the key.
If you can do more work than the work that was done to sign a document then blockchain is useless. Bitcoin works because nobody has enough computing power to beat the system.
The work required to sign a Bitcoin transaction is trivial. The infamous 51% attack is an attack on the consensus algorithm, which determines which (valid) transactions to include in the blocks and which block is currently at the tip of the blockchain. No signing is involved at this stage. A successful attacker with more than 50% of the processing power in the network could, at most, block valid transactions from becoming recorded in the blockchain, or remove transactions which were added to the blockchain in the (recent) past. This can allow double-spending (the replacement of one valid transaction with another) if measures were not put in place to prevent it, such as waiting periods and periodic checkpoints. However, only those who depend on one of the attacker's recent transactions would be affected by an attempt to double-spend. In general a 51% attack on Bitcoin for the purpose of double-spending funds would represent a great deal of effort for a relatively minor payout.
Most blockchains incorporate both Authenticity and Consensus. Each transaction must be signed with an appropriate private key to be considered valid. Consensus is there to resolve conflicts among otherwise valid transactions.
And what's wrong with that? There are codes which can be decrypted multiple ways, after all—the most famous being the one-time pad, which can be decrypted to any message of the same length simply by choosing the right pad. The burden should be on the police to prove that the plaintext they produced is the same plaintext originally encrypted by the suspect, and not just something invented by the police which happens to share the same ciphertext.
So Facebook is now violating my 1st Amendment rights to interact with an elected official.
No, the elected official—not Facebook—is violating your 1st Amendment right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" by insisting that all interaction occurs through Facebook, a forum which is not open to all that official's constituents... unless, as is usually the case, the official does accept other forms of interaction equivalent to Facebook, in which case no one's constitutional rights are being violated.
This is wrong in every particular. Legal tender in the United States is not the abstract unit "dollars" but specifically "United States coins and currency". That includes Federal Reserve Notes, United States notes, and U.S. coins. It does not include Google Pay or VISA. Your own references state this explicitly. No one is obligated to accept cash for goods or services, but having provided goods or services on credit they can either accept legal tender as payment for that debt or else write off the debt. Legally speaking, if you owe a debt and offer to pay it in full with legal tender, and that payment is refused, the debt no longer exists.
In order to comply with the very strict rules governing an actual legal tender it is necessary, for example, actually to offer the exact amount due because no change can be demanded. [emphasis added]
At least in the UK, if you want to force someone to accept legal tender to settle your debt you'd better have the exact amount on hand, or else be willing to overpay. Overpayment on your part does not create a debt on their part for the difference.
Section 31 U.S.C. 5103... means that all United States money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor.
It's absolutely true that no one is obligated to accept cash for goods or services. One can instead require payment by some other means in advance, in which case there is no debt. Once goods or services have been provided on credit, however, a debt exists, and one cannot legally claim that this debt remains unpaid after full payment in legal tender has been offered and refused.
Debt has well defined payback terms pre-negotiated at the time debt is incurred.
The payback terms for the debt you incur for a haircut are that you pay before you leave, which in most cases is expected to be on the same day. That's even better-defined than the "offer to pay tomorrow" in your example.
If they're claiming that you owe them money, that's a debt and legal tender rules apply. The entire point of legal tender, after all, is to ensure that there is a standard way to settle exactly these sorts of disputes. Practically speaking it's less a matter of retail or contract law and more a matter of judicial procedure: Why would the government take your claim seriously if you've already been offered payment in full, in the government's own money no less, and refused? Say you did take them to court over "theft of service" or some such, and won; do you think the court will require them to compensate you by credit card? No, you'll get your payout in cash, and if you won't accept cash, why would they waste their time dealing with the matter?
The Department of Commerce has explained that that phrase does not mean merchants must accept cash.
Right, no one has to accept cash. They can choose not to trade with you instead. That doesn't apply here since the trade already took place.
If you walk into your bank with a suitcase full of cash to pay off your car loan, they cannot refuse it. The hair salon can...
No, the hair salon is in exactly the same position as the bank. They extended credit by performing the service prior to payment.
... I don't know what their options are after you've gotten your mohawk other than letting you have it for free.
That is exactly the option they would have to take if they refused payment in legal tender. Whether they accept it or not, as far as the law is concerned your offer to pay your debt in full in legal tender satisfies the debt. Even if they refuse to accept your money you no longer owe them anything. Of course, they can ban you from the salon or simply charge you extra on your next visit (with payment up front) in an attempt to make up the loss.
The reasonable solution, for those who don't want to deal with cash, would be to advertise the price as "$40 after $20 credit-card discount". If someone really wants to pay in cash they can, but they don't get the discount, and that $20 will go a long way toward offsetting the additional trouble of handling cash.
... $100 in old money is worth exactly as much as $100 in newly minted money or $100 in credit, yet only the first was actually earned.
The $100 in credit was also earned; the lender earned the principle, while the borrower earned the funds needed to pay the interest, thus renting the use of the principle from the lender for a time.
Of course, that "old money" may not actually be all that old. As you suggested, under the current system where fundamentally insolvent banks are propped up by the FDIC and related regulations a significant share of the funds being borrowed fall under the heading of "newly minted money". That minting happens when the deposit is invested, however, not specifically when credit is extended. Even without making loans banks could still "double-book" customer deposits by taking that money and putting it into illiquid investments, leaving them unable to meet depositors' reasonable expectations of timely withdrawals in the event of a bank run.
... but that doesn't mean the money extracted from you differs in any real way from you'd pay as an explicit tax.
Exactly. The key metric is goods and services consumed (i.e. spending). Tax vs. printing vs. fractional-reserve has some effect on who pays (income earners, lenders, savers) and who benefits (CPAs, borrowers, bankers) but doesn't fundamentally change the amount of productivity being siphoned out of the market by political means.
Slashdot Mirror
Money in the bank does not get sent back into the economy at large.
Um, that's exactly what's happening when money is put in the bank. They don't keep it all as cash in vault, you know. That money is used to buy investments and make loans. (Even if they did just keep it in a vault, taking currency out of circulation would still return that value to the economy in the form of deflation.)
In what sense is politicians doing what lobbyists ask not 100% the politicians' fault?
A lobbyist can make requests or suggestions, or perhaps offer a deal—but in the end it's the politician that has all the decision-making power.
Wealth is production, so if there's 10% more stuff we need 10% more currency
You don't need 10% more currency; you just need the currency, in aggregate, to become 10% more valuable. Which will happen automatically through price adjustments without any change in the supply.
It's a dead language but, for some reason, it's been decided it's appropriate for the law.
It's preferred because it's a dead language. That means the grammar and vocabulary tend to remain stable over long periods of time, unlike living languages which are constantly mutating.
The only reason people don't expect this is because they don't understand how insurance actually works.
No, the ones that don't expect subsidies are exactly the ones that do understand how insurance actually works.
If you expect, up front, that you are going to be subsidizing other insurance clients, that means you're over-paying. You should be able to get a better rate from another insurance provider who sets premiums more fairly. So you defect, leaving the first insurer to either raise their rates for their remaining clients to be more in line with their expected costs or else go out of business. (The insurer certainly isn't going to fund any subsidy; they're in this to make a profit.) Competition thus naturally drives the level of subsidy down to zero.
If you're using modern health "insurance" as your model, you should be aware that this has been distorted by politics to the point that it barely resembles insurance at all. It has more in common with a social program (enforced "charity") than any other product commonly referred to as insurance. Key differences include bans on properly assessing risk and using that to determine premiums (e.g. with regard to pre-existing conditions) and mandates for individuals to buy the product whether they want it or not. The point of these rules is to introduce subsidies into a system where they would not exist naturally.
Yes, we can have insurance contracts between two parties with no risk pool, but without a risk pool the insurance industry would not exist.
I'm not contesting that, but it's completely irrelevant. For the most part the insurance industry depends on risk pools to control costs. Insurance does not. The context of the comment I was replying to was "In theory, the idea behind insurance...". Not the insurance industry. Critically, without risk pools the insurance industry could not exist as it does now, but it would still be possible to offer insurance at a profit. The cost would be much higher, of course, and it might not be something everyone buys, but you can get custom insurance now for things which don't fit neatly into any large risk pools. The presence or absence of risk pools does not change the nature of the insurance contract.
Your risk is partly (sometimes greatly, sometimes almost entirely, depending on the situation) is assessed based on the observed/assessed risk of the group(s) you belong to.
Naturally. As with most things, the more precisely they want to estimate your personal risk the more it will cost, so they use a reasonable approximation based on a set of factors they can easily measure. That's a far cry from charging everyone the same premiums or ignoring obvious known factors like pre-existing conditions which have a significant effect on expected cost.
If 5000 people buy insurance, but only 50 are likely to require a payout in a given period, as a group they can each pay less.
They're not each paying less. Both the group as a whole and the majority of the individuals in the group paid more, not less, as a result of buying insurance. At best you could say, in hindsight, that the minority who received payouts paid less than they would have without insurance (and thus were not left bankrupt) while the rest paid a bit more due to the premiums. However, when comparing the present cost of insurance against possible future events it's the expected cost of each that matters, and the expected cost of insurance (premiums) is higher than the expected cost of whatever you're insuring against, due to overhead.
You also seem to be assuming that the members of this group all have exactly the same risk profile. If 400 of the 5000 have an estimated 10% chance of requiring a payout and the remaining 4600 have a 0.2% chance, however—and they are all paying the same premiums—then 400 of them are paying less than their expected cost and 4600 are paying more. That is what I would consider "socialization of costs", or equivalently "externalization of costs". It's unsustainable unless you force the second group to participate, since otherwise they would defect and stop subsidizing the first group, at which point the insurer either raises their premiums or goes out of business. Nonetheless, it's the system politicians are currently trying to enforce in place of health insurance.
Getting back to the original topic, none of the above has any bearing on the fact that insurance has all the hallmarks of gambling, just with the intent of reducing your risk, whereas betting at a casino or the race tracks typically means exposing oneself to greater risk. The mechanism is exactly the same. If you're going to ban casino or sports betting in the name of protecting people from themselves, however, you might as well take that to its logical conclusion and ban all activity that involves taking risks...
Say for example there is a disease that can be treated through regular yet painful treatments at the cost of $1 million. There is a cure for the disease, with a one-time application that costs $1.5 million. Quantitatively the treatment course is the best option as it it cheaper. However, qualitatively, the cure is the best option as it reduces suffering.
Is it? How much suffering might be involved in producing that extra half-million dollars needed for the more expensive cure?
In theory, the idea behind insurance is socialized cost : spreading the cost of accidents across a wider population.
No, that absolutely is not what insurance is about. I can see why you'd think that, because that is what certain politicians are trying to turn medical insurance into, but actual insurance (everything non-medical, basically) involves paying a known amount, the premium, to an insurer in exchange for them taking on risk in your place. In a competitive market, the premium and the risk will have similar expected costs (cost of event times probability of event) with the difference being the insurer's administrative costs, capital expenses, and profit margin. The expected cost is not "socialized": No one buys insurance expecting up front to either subsidize other clients or be subsidized themselves. Everyone pays a premium in line with their own personal degree of risk.
The existence of a risk pool is what makes this a viable business proposition—the individual events may be hard to predict, but when an insurer combines a number of uncorrelated events together they get a fairly predictable aggregate expense, which means they can get by without holding enough capital in reserve to pay out on all their contracts simultaneously. However, that is strictly an internal detail of the insurance business and not a factor in the definition of insurance. It's still insurance even if we're just talking about a contract between two parties with no risk pool.
Wait, what? Is all insurance gambling?
Yes, all insurance is gambling. Or to be more precise, it's counter-gambling—you're already gambling by involving yourself in an activity with some element of risk, and in buying insurance you're placing an opposing bet in order to cancel out some or all of that risk.
Say you're a participant in a horse race, for example. There is no qualitative difference between taking out insurance against the possibility of a loss and simply placing a bet for your opponent(s) to win. Either way you get a bit less if you win (the insurance premium or the amount of the bet) in exchange for receiving some prearranged payout in the event that you lose, thus reducing your risk.
Why ... would it mean anything else than weight diminished by a factor of five?
Because if they'd meant that they would have said either "80% lighter than" or "one-fifth as heavy as". Phrases of the form "X times less than Y" (including "lighter than", "smaller than", etc.) are a literal translation of the formula "Y - (X * Y)" into natural language.
Unless perhaps you're defining "lightness" idiosyncratically as the reciprocal of weight, in which case "5 times lighter" really would equal "one-fifth as heavy". That's the difference between "X times as conductive" and "X times as resistive", because conductivity is defined as the reciprocal of resistance. Approximately no one actually thinks of "lightness" that way, however. (Quick check: Does "20% lighter" mean subtracting 20% of the weight, or adding 20% to the reciprocal of the weight? 80% as heavy, or 83% as heavy? Most would say the former.)
There's nothing wrong in principle with "20% thinner"; it means the original thickness reduced by 20%, or 80% as thick.
I agree that the other examples are nonsense, though. "Five times lighter" would be a negative weight (the original weight minus five times the original weight), and the same goes for "10 times slower". Unless they've figured out anti-gravity or time travel...
I assume that $2.7 trillion figure was based on total population, not adult population. The actual figures are around 230 million adults in the US and 130 million households, for $1.9 trillion annually or about $14,800 per household. Which is still a great deal of money.
This only tells us that it won't effect unemployment one way or the other compared to their control group.
No, it only tells us that it won't reduce unemployment. They never said that employment among the participants was on par with the control group—only that it wasn't higher. That leaves open the possibility that the participants had lower employment levels than the control group. Don't just assume that someone with an obvious investment in the success of the experiment would be up-front about negative results in an informal preliminary interview.
The test is "do people work less?" and even on this very limited test, the answer is no.
The article said no such thing. It said that some of the participants found work, and that they were not more likely to do so than the control group. While many people seem to be taking this for granted, the article never said that participants were just as likely to find work as the control group. The full results of the study will not be released until next year. My impression from the article was that they are admitting that they didn't get the results they wanted (more employment) but at least for now are avoiding the subject of just how much negative impact the experiment had on employment rates among the participants while attempting to refocus attention on other aspects like the participants' reported "happiness".
Regarding those who did get jobs: All the participants are well aware that this experiment won't last forever, so it makes sense to plan for what happens after it ends. How might that change under a true UBI, where they can count on receiving payments for the rest of their lives?
At $700 per month, the cost isn't that high. If you did that in the U.S. it comes out to $2.7 trillion...
What world do you live in where $20,000 per household annually can be written off as not that high?
Blockchains depend on 'work' for authentication.
Authentication in blockchains is based on private keys, not "work". Short of brute-forcing the private key—which would undermine any cryptography-based system—no amount of processing will permit you to spend Bitcoins for which you don't already have the key.
If you can do more work than the work that was done to sign a document then blockchain is useless. Bitcoin works because nobody has enough computing power to beat the system.
The work required to sign a Bitcoin transaction is trivial. The infamous 51% attack is an attack on the consensus algorithm, which determines which (valid) transactions to include in the blocks and which block is currently at the tip of the blockchain. No signing is involved at this stage. A successful attacker with more than 50% of the processing power in the network could, at most, block valid transactions from becoming recorded in the blockchain, or remove transactions which were added to the blockchain in the (recent) past. This can allow double-spending (the replacement of one valid transaction with another) if measures were not put in place to prevent it, such as waiting periods and periodic checkpoints. However, only those who depend on one of the attacker's recent transactions would be affected by an attempt to double-spend. In general a 51% attack on Bitcoin for the purpose of double-spending funds would represent a great deal of effort for a relatively minor payout.
Most blockchains incorporate both Authenticity and Consensus. Each transaction must be signed with an appropriate private key to be considered valid. Consensus is there to resolve conflicts among otherwise valid transactions.
And what's wrong with that? There are codes which can be decrypted multiple ways, after all—the most famous being the one-time pad, which can be decrypted to any message of the same length simply by choosing the right pad. The burden should be on the police to prove that the plaintext they produced is the same plaintext originally encrypted by the suspect, and not just something invented by the police which happens to share the same ciphertext.
So Facebook is now violating my 1st Amendment rights to interact with an elected official.
No, the elected official—not Facebook—is violating your 1st Amendment right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" by insisting that all interaction occurs through Facebook, a forum which is not open to all that official's constituents... unless, as is usually the case, the official does accept other forms of interaction equivalent to Facebook, in which case no one's constitutional rights are being violated.
This is wrong in every particular. Legal tender in the United States is not the abstract unit "dollars" but specifically "United States coins and currency". That includes Federal Reserve Notes, United States notes, and U.S. coins. It does not include Google Pay or VISA. Your own references state this explicitly. No one is obligated to accept cash for goods or services, but having provided goods or services on credit they can either accept legal tender as payment for that debt or else write off the debt. Legally speaking, if you owe a debt and offer to pay it in full with legal tender, and that payment is refused, the debt no longer exists.
According to the Royal Mint:
In order to comply with the very strict rules governing an actual legal tender it is necessary, for example, actually to offer the exact amount due because no change can be demanded. [emphasis added]
At least in the UK, if you want to force someone to accept legal tender to settle your debt you'd better have the exact amount on hand, or else be willing to overpay. Overpayment on your part does not create a debt on their part for the difference.
You're in their debt and they are legally required to accept cash as payment for that debt.
Got a citation for that?
Well, there is this Federal Reserve page, which you also quoted:
Section 31 U.S.C. 5103 ... means that all United States money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor.
It's absolutely true that no one is obligated to accept cash for goods or services. One can instead require payment by some other means in advance, in which case there is no debt. Once goods or services have been provided on credit, however, a debt exists, and one cannot legally claim that this debt remains unpaid after full payment in legal tender has been offered and refused.
Debt has well defined payback terms pre-negotiated at the time debt is incurred.
The payback terms for the debt you incur for a haircut are that you pay before you leave, which in most cases is expected to be on the same day. That's even better-defined than the "offer to pay tomorrow" in your example.
If they're claiming that you owe them money, that's a debt and legal tender rules apply. The entire point of legal tender, after all, is to ensure that there is a standard way to settle exactly these sorts of disputes. Practically speaking it's less a matter of retail or contract law and more a matter of judicial procedure: Why would the government take your claim seriously if you've already been offered payment in full, in the government's own money no less, and refused? Say you did take them to court over "theft of service" or some such, and won; do you think the court will require them to compensate you by credit card? No, you'll get your payout in cash, and if you won't accept cash, why would they waste their time dealing with the matter?
The Department of Commerce has explained that that phrase does not mean merchants must accept cash.
Right, no one has to accept cash. They can choose not to trade with you instead. That doesn't apply here since the trade already took place.
If you walk into your bank with a suitcase full of cash to pay off your car loan, they cannot refuse it. The hair salon can...
No, the hair salon is in exactly the same position as the bank. They extended credit by performing the service prior to payment.
... I don't know what their options are after you've gotten your mohawk other than letting you have it for free.
That is exactly the option they would have to take if they refused payment in legal tender. Whether they accept it or not, as far as the law is concerned your offer to pay your debt in full in legal tender satisfies the debt. Even if they refuse to accept your money you no longer owe them anything. Of course, they can ban you from the salon or simply charge you extra on your next visit (with payment up front) in an attempt to make up the loss.
The reasonable solution, for those who don't want to deal with cash, would be to advertise the price as "$40 after $20 credit-card discount". If someone really wants to pay in cash they can, but they don't get the discount, and that $20 will go a long way toward offsetting the additional trouble of handling cash.
... $100 in old money is worth exactly as much as $100 in newly minted money or $100 in credit, yet only the first was actually earned.
The $100 in credit was also earned; the lender earned the principle, while the borrower earned the funds needed to pay the interest, thus renting the use of the principle from the lender for a time.
Of course, that "old money" may not actually be all that old. As you suggested, under the current system where fundamentally insolvent banks are propped up by the FDIC and related regulations a significant share of the funds being borrowed fall under the heading of "newly minted money". That minting happens when the deposit is invested, however, not specifically when credit is extended. Even without making loans banks could still "double-book" customer deposits by taking that money and putting it into illiquid investments, leaving them unable to meet depositors' reasonable expectations of timely withdrawals in the event of a bank run.
... but that doesn't mean the money extracted from you differs in any real way from you'd pay as an explicit tax.
Exactly. The key metric is goods and services consumed (i.e. spending). Tax vs. printing vs. fractional-reserve has some effect on who pays (income earners, lenders, savers) and who benefits (CPAs, borrowers, bankers) but doesn't fundamentally change the amount of productivity being siphoned out of the market by political means.