Video is below
Could cash ever become criminal?
I read an article on this a while ago and it’s not a ludicrous question.
Money has dramatically changed in my lifetime. Many of us keep some cash in our pockets but most of our money is “out there” in some form or another in a digital world.
Do you really even know how it all works or how it is tracked? Sure you get a statement each month but so what — Bernie Madoff’s clients had statements and Jon Corzine once said he :didn’t lose a billion and a half bucks” — “he can’t find it”.
On another side, big exchanges of money such as purchasing a home or payroll are handled by direct bank to bank transfers and direct deposits. Even micro payments are now handled digitally with things such as Square.
Paypal is now commonplace — I remember not too long ago when even this was weird — even people who used it sometimes wondered how your email could tie to your credit card or bank then magically money would move.
The next widely accepted step even beyond Square was payment via cell phone — go to the store, bump your phone, payment happens, digits move.
This is all convenient for sure, but who would have an interest in being able to track every single financial transaction in your life?
Who out there would like to control this? The answer of course is governments. People are sovereign beings — that is they are responsible for their own governance at the individual level.
More often than not the one thing in the way of individual sovereignty is government. Governments want to look at the world as a collective, and their objectives are to try to manage overall society.
This might be fine enough until the collective becomes more important than the individual where it becomes OK to steal from one individual to give to another without the consent of the first.
This doesn’t square well if you are an individual, especially if you are an individual who has the gall to believe that you are first and foremost in charge of your own governance.
So what does the everlasting discussion between individual and government have to do with cash? Given that our governments are led by people who create more problems than they solve (who then campaign to get re-elected to solve the problems they created….) and need your cooperation in order to accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish, it’s not out of the question that one day cash transactions would be illegal because cash (cold hard cash) is the last tool that allows the individual his/her own sovereignty.
Individuals are going to have to start strategizing for a future reality. What do you do? Where do you live? Passports? Proxies? It’s already started — thanks to overbearing laws, regulations, and outright theft by governments, people are looking at the world and looking for intelligent ways to deal with this.
Even back in 2009 Tim Ferris had a blog post on “How to Become Jason Bourne” and there are many sites on how to manage a world where government is too big for it’s britches.
In a world where everything is online and going online and where everything is tracked down to the I.P. address and beyond in order to discern patterns, is it that ridiculous of a premise to say that one day money will not be outlawed but cash would be?
What would happen if that happens? Could it evolve a useful private currency among like-minded individuals on a local level (your immediate community)? Would there possibly be a private form of currency between individuals on a national or international level? This is the appeal behind Bitcoin. A million things I never thought would happen in my lifetime have happened just in the past 10 years and boldly — who can say what solutions will present themselves to sovereign individuals down the road.
Governments the world over print money and we throw around the terms millions, billions, and trillions now almost interchangeably — people become numb to it and corruption happens right in front of your eyes. Taxpayers are bailing out governments who in turn bail out taxpayers who in turn pay taxes to send back to governments who then bailout companies and on and on.
For example, American taxpayers bailed out the bankrupt FHA about 10 years ago, which in turn set rules on mortgage lending to the same taxpayers that just bailed it out. What is has happen and continues to happen from Greece to Italy to Spain, to Portugal to Germany to the USA, and a host of countries in between, is the lenders and the borrowers have become the same people.
That can’t last — at some point the volleyball hits the sand. And when governments go into existential crises they do whatever they have to in the name of self preservation.
So in an age when you don’t actually need cash to pay for something, the last step a government can take in completely having control over an individual is to criminalize cash (in the name of convenience, obscurity, or some other innocuous stated purpose). And here in 2020 governments leverage any story in the news to discourge cash and encourage credit card spending.
Fiat currencies are losing the faith of the holder and at some point we’re going to have to actually make fiat currency solid again. And even though we might not “need” hard cash, a world without that tool of exchange would not be good.
Consider a scene from the future if cash is criminalized — Let’s say you’re a “problem” citizen who still thinks individual rights hold substantial weight — On Monday you have money in the bank, and with the push of a far away button on Tuesday by someone you don’t even know you don’t.
If you don’t think that can happen, then watch the video at the top of this post starting at the 5:40 minute mark (then go back and watch the whole video). Criminalization of cash will just be the next step.
