Carte Blanche: The war on cash
Pixabay
Government, by its very nature, invites greater controls and surveillance of its citizens to ensure “stability” at all costs. The definition of what constitutes that varies across time periods and cultures, but ultimately, the answer is the same. Nowhere is that drive for control more evident in a nation's desires to control what its citizens can do in their private lives, especially how and where they spend their hard-earned money. As the world becomes more interconnected, driven by advances in AI and the systems it enables, so too do governments' abilities to monitor every facet of its citizens’ lives. The argument, as always, centers around safety. But what does that look like, safe for the people or safe for the government? One of the best examples so far is China's social credit system. The government, through CCTV monitoring, facial recognition software, digital passports, and digital banking, monitors every choice and behavior of the Chinese people. This unprecedented access allows the CCP to decide at the drop of a hat if you’ve bought too much, traveled too often, or not paid enough in taxes. With a Centralized Digital Banking Currency (CBDC), it is determined how you are allowed to spend your money and, by extension, what choices you are allowed to make on any given day. A cashless society is a step in that direction.
In the European Union, the transition to a cashless society has been decided and will soon be implemented. The European Bank touts the system's benefits, saying it allows digital currency to serve the same purposes as cash for those who don’t have ready access to it. They present their argument as progressive and thus obvious in the need to facilitate the change. Merchants, customers, and everyone in between would greatly benefit from not having the burden of dealing with cash. No more making change or being unable to haggle, which I had no idea was dependent on only having a credit card, would be made easier. The European mindset is a difficult one for an American to understand. Most of all, the argument is that sovereignty can only be guaranteed through central control over currency and transactions.
“But for Europe in particular, there is an additional, specific and critically important reason: not having a digital form of cash puts our strategic autonomy at risk.”
- European Central Bank
Those who argue for centralization will always argue for the ease of access and the standardization of financial transactions, but never the cost to the individual, both of liberty and privacy. How much someone is worth, or how much money they have, has always relied on the amount they have at any given time. There are arguments to be made about property and stock values, but at the end of the day, a person has as much money as they can have and hold in their hands. If currency manipulation is a problem now, it will be exponentially worse when all currency is purely digital and thus abstract. The EU wants to take this a step further by banning all cash transactions over 10,000 euros and supervising and limiting those over 3,000 euros. It will call into question not just what their citizens can do with their money, but whether they own it in the first place.
There have been many forms of government tried over the millennia, and many arguments made about the roles of governments and citizens. One argument in particular, which holds center stage regardless of the form of government, is more relevant now than ever, as advanced technologies become increasingly prevalent. What is more important, the state or the people? By ending cash and deciding that the government must be able to track and control every interaction or decision its citizens make, the lives of citizens become irrelevant to the whims of government elites and bureaucrats. Under the Biden Administration, it was decided that extreme measures were needed to address money laundering and tax fraud. So the $20,000 minimum reporting threshold had to be lowered to $600 for third-party payment systems such as PayPal and Venmo. What makes this important, among other things, is that it switches the responsibility of the government to prove wrongdoing to private citizens proving they’ve done nothing wrong. Inversing innocent until guilty to guilty until the government decides otherwise.
“Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”
- John Locke
Privacy is a right so regularly overlooked or ignored that, at times, people forget they have a right to it in the first place. Yes, many people willingly give up their rights every day through social media and their choices in their personal lives. They have the right to reclaim that privacy at any time, should they wish to. If cash is outright banned and governments can monitor its citizens without any recourse at any hour of the day, then the people will lose that most basic right and every liberty they hold dear. Governments have eroded almost all other rights, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be stopped and those rights regained and enshrined again. It is a simple thing to stop by an ATM and grab a few dollars each week. In the end, it may be the least time-consuming and, by far, the least dangerous way to resist government overreach. The choice lies with each citizen: whether they want to keep cash and the freedom of choice that comes with it, or give in to the idea that governments know better. Choose wisely.