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April
06
2018

Cashless society
Commander Zero

No doubt you’ve heard the term ‘cashless society’, right? Basically, it means a system where the usage of physical currency has been supplanted by the use of ‘cashless’ forms of payment….debit cards, electronic wallets, etc. They’ve already started experimenting with this sort of thing in parts of Europe (naturally) and this sort of thing is being hailed by the technology fans as a tremendous advancement in society…muggings and robberies will fade as people no longer have cash. Why hold someone up in an alleyway or knock over a MiniMart when there’s no cash there?

Who else lauds this move to the cashless society? Folks who feel they have an interest in keeping tabs on what you do with your money. I’m of the opinion that whether I’m buying a Slim Jim and a copy of Hustler at 3am in 7-11, or buying a duffel bag of AR mags out of the back of a van in the Domino’s parking lot, what I do with my money is no one’s business but mine.

I was in the bank today and saw this lovely sign:

This is what I would call a ‘soft ban’. A hard ban would be the outright prohibition of the use of cash. Knowing that sort of thing might actually not go over well with a large chunk of the voting constituency, the alternative is to make the transactions more and more annoying to the point where the average Joe says “Screw it, it’s easier for me to just move the money to your account using [PayPal/ACH/Debitcard/etc]”. See, they don’t actually ban the cash, they just make it more and more difficult to the point where it may as well be a ban. (Machine guns are a good example…they’re not banned, they just require a tax..and fingerprints..and background checks…and police approval..and nine months of waiting…and…and…and…to the point where they may as well be banned.)

Governments angle, of course, is tax revenue. Oh, they cloak it in ‘war on terrorism’ nonsense…can’t let those guys have a bake sale amd then move the money to Islamabad to buy RPG’s..but a happy side-effect (for the .gov) is that it’s far easier to make sure you’re claiming all the money you make for tax purposes.

Taxes aside, no one needs to be able to look at financial records and determine who bought freezedrieds, ammo, guns, bus tickets, politically-sloganed sportswear, or anything else for that matter.

There will always be that group of people (raises hand) who prefer to do cash transactions for things. When Kroger stops taking cash and only takes EBT and debit cards, or the local Conoco only takes plastic ‘for the safety of our staff’, what choices are left to you? Barter? I suppose that might work but the guy working the island at the Costco gas pumps isn’t in any position to dispense fuel for cash (or cash equivalents). You’re only real recourse will be small businesses and entrepreneurs who will fill that market void…and, reasonably, make a profit. $2.50 a gallon for gas with your debit card at Costco, or $4 a gallon in the back of the WalMart parking lot from a bunch of five-gallon cans in the back of someones pickup.

I used to work in an adult bookstore. Virtually all the transactions were in cash for a very obvious reason – no one wanted their spouse (or whoever) getting the cancelled checks or credit card statements and seeing that someone had rented movie or bought toys. Did the store owner declare all that lovely undeclared cash? Beats me. But the takeaway here is that using cash afforded a level of privacy.

The usual crowd will address these issues by saying  ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide then you shouldn’t have a problem with it’. Thats the same crowd that has schoolkids wearing see-through backpacks and want’s a backdoor to unlock your phone. ‘Reasonable’ and ‘commonsense’ limitations on privacy, of course.

Whats the privacy-minded to do? Well, the obvious answer, to me, is also the shady answer – go create a fake identity and load it up with a debit card or other electronic banking info. But…that would be wrong, You could use some anonymous electronic payment form like a prepaid debit card like you’d find in vending machines or in the gift rack at the supermarket checkout, but those actually have some limitations on how they can be used. I suppose the lowest-impact thing to do would be to vigilantly make sure that your must-be-private transactions are done with cash. And, of course, whenever possible try to be paid in cash.

Cryptocurrency? That’s definitely something that has potential, but it’s still a bit too unstable at the moment. The idea is brilliant and wonderful and, of course, of great concern to .gov who thinks that unmonitored financial transactions are the work of terrorists and bad guys and not simply people who want their privacy.

Gold and silver are about as close a thing as we have to a universal currency. Trouble is, you still can’t really go into WalMart and buy a deli bucket of chicken wings with it. Oh you can convert it into a currency that will let you get your bucket of wings, but if that WalMart doesn’t take cash then what exactly will you convert it to?

I’m not sure what the solution is. I suppose it’s to simply be prepared to pay a premium to do things the ‘off the grid’ way. The more clever and morally flexible of us will, no doubt, come up with some workarounds but that has its own set of problems and issues.

For now, I suppose I’ll just have to keep an eye on how things develop.

 

 

 

 

Commander Zero is a brillinat-yet-humble survivalist of great mirth and great melancholies. He resides in western Montana living a life of quiet dissatisfaction.

 

www.commanderzero.com