Cash is very efficient for small transactions. Cash transactions are immediate, flexible and anonymous. Cash does not need a password and can’t be hacked. The usefulness of cash is not dependent on technology that might break down – and sometimes does, creating huge problems.
A benefit of eliminating cash and moving to a digital economy, they claim, is combating crime. However, cash isn’t all that convenient for illicit transactions. It has the disadvantage for criminals of being small-scale. For large amounts of illicit transactions, you need to go digital.
The ideal medium for illicit drug commerce in 2014, for example, was – believe it or not – Amazon gift tokens. More recently, money launderers have used online gambling sites to disguise their shady funds. Cash on the other hand has allowed crimes to be discovered. Not least of all because, unlike digital, cash requires a face-to-face transaction. In 2021, a criminal ring attempting to launder money in Canada was caught when they tried to deposit large amounts of cash with a bank.
So why are they trying to move us into a cashless society? And who is “they”?
At the end of 2019, Kevin Dowd, Professor of Finance and Economics at Durham University, wrote an essay that was published in the Economic Affairs magazine.
You can browse Prof. Dowd’s articles about ‘The War on Cash’ on his website HERE. Our article is paraphrased from a blog he wrote, as published on the Institute of Economic Affairs (“IEA”) website, and his 2019 essay titled ‘The war on cash is about much more than cash’.
His essay details the arguments used by those pushing for a cashless society and a digital economy and why these arguments are faulty if not outright false. At 8 pages long it may seem daunting to some but it is written in an easy-to-read style with ample subheadings to use as markers to pick up where you left off should you choose to read it one section at a time. We encourage our readers to take the time to read his essay in full.
Among the principal benefits claimed for the so-called War on Cash (“WoC”) are that it would help combat crime and it would give central banks additional room for monetary policy manoeuvre. The policy is being promoted by an alliance of big digital payments firms, control ideologues and central banks.
The big digital payments firms promote WoC for commercial reasons: they wish to eliminate a competitor so they can increase the fees they charge on digital transactions. They also benefit from collecting data on our spending habits, data which cannot be obtained if we pay by cash.
The second group promoting an end to cash do so as part of an agenda of increasing state control. They argue that cash should be abolished because “bad guys” – money launderers, drug smugglers and terrorists – use it. Yes, bad guys do use cash, but so do the rest of us. If we should abolish cash because bad guys use it, then the same argument applies to everything else they use including digital money, which is more widely used for criminal activities than cash itself.
The third group promoting the WoC are central bankers. As interest rates have fallen, central banks have seen their ability further to reduce interest rates become severely squeezed. Abolishing cash would enable them to overcome this constraint and allow them to push interest rates deep into negative territory in their efforts to stimulate the economy. The point here is that if central banks were to attempt to implement negative rate policies without first abolishing cash, then people would switch large-scale into cash to thwart their efforts. Thus, cash would need to be abolished to force people into negative-rate assets.
The use of cash confers important benefits that digital money does not. That the War on Cash would deprive us of those benefits is the least of its problems, however.
It also threatens to undermine our privacy by allowing all our spending to be tracked. Once the government has coerced everyone into using electronic currency that it can control, it can then also control how we spend it.
The government then has the power to control … everything. It can identify and block payments to or from individuals or organisations of which it disapproves. Its control of payments would be absolute and it could use that control to go after its enemies – real or imagined makes no difference – and destroy them by depriving them of their sustenance.
Anyone who got on the wrong side of the authorities – political opponents, whistle‐blowers, alleged criminals, anyone – can then be subjected to “cancellation” and made to disappear merely by blocking access to their bank accounts.
A government dominated by health fanatics could then compel us to follow personalised health “recommendations” determined by the latest health fad. A government dominated by environmentalist fanatics could force us to “save the planet” according to the dictates of the latest environmentalist fad. A government dominated by religious fanatics could prevent us from engaging in immoral activities, to save our souls. The possibilities are endless.
You may say that governments wouldn’t act this way. But governments are already well advanced along this path.
In addition to the very real concerns regarding total government control and destruction of our civil liberties, the WoC threatens to undermine our privacy, expropriate large amounts of legitimately acquired wealth, expose us all to the risks of fallible digital systems, inflict severe adverse effects on the vulnerable and enable central banks to embark on dangerous negative interest rate policies.
We should fight back and keep spending cash.
Source: The War on Cash: Who’s behind it and why are they doing it?