cashless society – Page 2 – The Burning Platform

The Shift to a Cashless Society is Snowballing

Love it or hate it, cash is playing an increasingly less important role in society.

In some ways this is great news for consumers. The rise of mobile and electronic payments means faster, convenient, and more efficient purchases in most instances. New technologies are being built and improved to facilitate these transactions, and improving security is also a priority for many payment providers.

However, there is also a darker side in the shift to a cashless society. Governments and central banks have a different rationale behind the elimination of cash transactions, and as a result, the so-called “war on cash” is on.

On the Path to a Cashless Society

The Federal Reserve estimates that there will be $616.9 billion in cashless transactions in 2016. That’s up from around $60 billion in 2010.

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How a Cashless Society Could Embolden Big Brother

SUBMITTED BY — THINKER

What occurs to me is that those of us who are Libertarians have so much in common with the “Left” when it comes to surveillance. But, where they don’t yet associate Big Government with loss of privacy and the kind of loss of freedom expressed in this article, I think our end goals — basic, human rights — are the same. Thinker.

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When money becomes information, it can inform on you.

In 2014, Cass Sunstein—one-time “regulatory czar” for the Obama administration—wrote an op-ed advocating for a cashless society, on the grounds that it would reduce street crime. His reasoning? A new study had found an apparent causal relationship between the implementation of the Electronic Benefit Transfer system for welfare benefits, and a drop in crime.

Under the new EBT system, welfare recipients could now use debit cards, rather than being forced to cash checks in their entirety—meaning there was less cash circulating in poor neighborhoods. And the less cash there was on the streets, the study’s authors concluded, the less crime there was.Perhaps burglaries, larcenies, and assaults had gone down because there was simply less to readily steal. Perhaps, also, the debit cards deterred people from spending money on drugs and other black market goods. While nothing was really stopping them from withdrawing cash and then spending it illegally, the famous Sunsteinian Nudge was in effect—the very slightest friction in the environment pushed people away from committing crime.

The year after Sunstein’s op-ed was published, in a seemingly unrelated incident, a student at Columbia University was arrested and charged with five drug-related offenses, including possession with the intent to sell. Supposedly, his fellow students and customers had paid him through the Paypal-owned smartphone app Venmo.Venmo makes every transaction public by default. The app features a social-network-like feed where you can see your friends sending each other varying sums of money, often accompanied with cute descriptions and emoji. The alleged dealer asked his customers to write a funny description for every transaction, and in doing so, turned his feed (and others’) into an open record of drug trafficking.

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The World’s First Cashless Society Is Here – A Totalitarian’s Dream Come True

By Nick Giambruno

Central planners around the world are waging a War on Cash. In just the last few years:

Italy made cash transactions over €1,000 illegal;
Switzerland proposed banning cash payments in excess of 100,000 francs;
Russia banned cash transactions over $10,000;
Spain banned cash transactions over €2,500;
Mexico made cash payments of more than 200,000 pesos illegal;
Uruguay banned cash transactions over $5,000; and
France made cash transactions over €1,000 illegal, down from the previous limit of €3,000.

The War on Cash is a favorite pet project of the economic central planners. They want to eliminate hand-to-hand currency so that governments can document, control, and tax everything.

This is why they’re lowering the threshold for mandatory reporting of cash transactions and, in some instances, simply making it illegal to pay cash.

In the U.S., central planners ratchet up the War on Cash every time the government declares a made-up war on something else…a war on crime, a war on drugs, a war on poverty, a war on terror…

They all end with more government intrusion into your financial affairs.

Thanks to these made-up wars, the U.S. government is imposing an increasing number of regulations on cash transactions. Try withdrawing more than $10,000 in cash from your bank. They’ll treat you like a criminal or terrorist.

The Federal Reserve is at the center of the War on Cash. Its weapons are inflation and control over the currency denominations.

Take the $100 note, for example. It’s the largest bill in circulation today. This was not always the case. At one point, the U.S. had $500, $1,000, $5,000, and even $10,000 notes. But the government eliminated these large notes in 1969 under the pretext of fighting the War on Some Drugs.

Since then, the $100 note has been the largest. But it has far less purchasing power than it did in 1969. Decades of rampant money printing have inflated the dollar. Today, a $100 note buys less than a $20 note did in 1969.

Even though the Federal Reserve has devalued the dollar over 80% since 1969, it still refuses to issue notes larger than $100. This makes it inconvenient to use cash for large transactions, which forces people to use electronic payment methods.

This, of course, is what the U.S. government wants.

It’s exactly like Ron Paul said: “The cashless society is the IRS’s dream: total knowledge of, and control over, the finances of every single American.”

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CONSUMERS NOT FOLLOWING ORDERS

Last week the government reported personal income and spending for April. After months of blaming non-existent consumer spending on cold weather, shockingly occurring during the Winter, the captured mainstream media pundits, Ivy League educated Wall Street economist lackeys, and Keynesian loving money printers at the Fed have run out of propaganda to explain why Americans are not spending money they don’t have. The corporate mainstream media is now visibly angry with the American people for not doing what the Ivy League propagated Keynesian academic models say they should be doing.

The ultimate mouthpiece for the banking cabal, Jon Hilsenrath, who does the bidding of the Federal Reserve at the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal, wrote an arrogant, condescending, putrid diatribe, directed at the middle class victims of Wall Street banker criminality and Federal Reserve acquiescence to the vested corporate interests that run this country. Here are the more disgusting portions of his denunciation of the formerly middle class working people of America.

We know you experienced a terrible shock when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 and your employer responded by firing you.

We also know you shouldn’t have taken out that large second mortgage during the housing boom to fix up your kitchen with granite counter-tops.

You should feel lucky you’re not a Greek consumer.

Fed officials want to start raising the cost of your borrowing because they worry they’ve been giving you a free ride for too long with zero interest rates.

We listen to Fed officials all of the time here at The Wall Street Journal, and they just can’t figure you out.

Please let us know the problem.

The Wall Street Journal was swamped with thousands of angry responses from irate real people living in the real world, not the elite, QE enriched, oligarchs living in Manhattan penthouses, mansions on the Hamptons, or luxury condos in Washington, D.C. Hilsenrath presumes to know how the average American has been impacted by the criminal actions of sycophantic Ivy League educated central bankers and their avaricious Wall Street owners.

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Cashless Society – Tracking Gold – the Hunt for Loose Change

If the oligarchs actually attempt to create a cashless society, I think it would start a revolution. Eliminating cash is how the oligarchs want to add a fee to every transaction and to track everything you do so they can tax you. Think about how many mom and pop restaurants and retailers would be forced out of business. This would be the tipping point.

Think about the food stamp program. You used to get actual foodstamps. Bankers had nothing to do with the transactions between the recipient and the food store. Now the money is loaded onto a card and swiped at the POS. JP Morgan now collects billions from the downtrodden and retailers. They sell these ideas as efficiency, when it is nothing but a new method of rape and pillage.

Know your enemy.

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

I do not see how it will be possible to eliminate physical money, for it would require Third World economies to adopt modern technology.More than half the world is not into technology. Moreover, there is still a reasonable segment of people within the industrialized world who are not into the technology age. Denmark will move to a near fully electronic money system come January 2016. Stores will not accept cash but there must be exceptions such as medical.

Such a transition urged by Rogoff and Buiter, the harbingers of Economic Totalitarianism, merely illustrate how they live in a bubble and do not see that the entire world does not fit the way they live. That does not mean the major nations will not attempt such a scheme for they are desperate for cash. A friend applied for a mortgage. Every penny they were putting down as the down-payment had to be proved right down to a check for $400. What was it for and why did a relative give them $400. The questions were all related to what they are calling money laundering or in other words tracing every penny for tax purposes.

Europe is looking at this move to electronic money because the banking system is infected with euro debt of member states lacking a single reserve debt system as exists outside in the USA, Canada, Britain, and Australia just to mention a few.So the design of the Euro is a fatal flaw and instead of correcting the design, they choose to become more authoritarian.

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Why The Powers That Be Are Pushing A Cashless Society

Submitted by George Washington on 05/04/2015 00:23 -0400

We Can’t Rein In the Banks If We Can’t Pull Our Money Out of Them

Martin Armstrong summarizes the headway being made to ban cash, and argues that the goal of those pushing a cashless society is to prevent bank runs … and increase their control:

The central banks are … planning drastic restrictions on cash itself. They see moving to electronic money will first eliminate the underground economy, but secondly, they believe it will even prevent a banking crisis.This idea of eliminating cash was first floated as the normal trial balloon to see how the people take it. It was first launched by Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Willem Buiter, the chief economist at Citigroup. Their claims have been widely hailed and their papers are now the foundation for the new age of Economic Totalitarianism that confronts us. Rogoff and Buiter have laid the ground work for the end of much of our freedom and will one day will be considered the new Marx with hindsight. They sit in their lofty offices but do not have real world practical experience beyond theory. Considerations of their arguments have shown how governments can seize all economic power are destroy cash in the process eliminating all rights. Physical paper money provides the check against negative interest rates for if they become too great, people will simply withdraw their funds and hoard cash. Furthermore, paper currency allows for bank runs. Eliminate paper currency and what you end up with is the elimination of the ability to demand to withdraw funds from a bank.

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In many nations, specific measures have already been taken demonstrating that the Rogoff-Buiter world of Economic Totalitarianism is indeed upon us. This is the death of Capitalism. Of course the socialists hate Capitalism and see other people’s money should be theirs. What they cannot see is that Capitalism is freedom from government totalitarianism. The freedom to pursue the field you desire without filling the state needs that supersede your own.

There have been test runs of this Rogoff-Buiter Economic Totalitarianism to see if the idea works. I reported on June 21, 2014 that Britain was doing a test run. A shopping street in Manchester banned cash as part of an experiment to see if Brits would accept a cashless society. London buses ended accepting cash payments from July 2014. Meanwhile, Currency Exchange dealers began offering debt cards instead of cash that they market as being safer to travel with. The Chorlton, South Manchester experiment was touted to test customers and business reaction to the idea for physical currency will disappear inside 20 years.

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