Cashless Society Is A Freedom Killer

Kill cash? Only if you want to kill freedom, says law professor

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Sam Rolley

Glenn Reynolds, a law professor and regular contributor to Instapundit, says calls to begin weakening the power of cash by doing away with large bills means killing the currency of freedom.

We told you about the recent interest in eliminating large forms of currency here a couple weeks ago.

Here’s a little refresher:

Larry Summers, an ex-treasury secretary who served as an economic advisor to the Obama administration, argues in a recent Washington Post blog that large bills such as the U.S.’s $100 and the European Union’s 500-euro bills aid in corruption and criminal activity throughout the world.

His rather simplistic basis for the argument: Large sums of money consisting of big bills weigh less than if they were made up of smaller currency denominations.

To make it harder for criminals to move money unnoticed, Summers is calling for “a global agreement to stop issuing notes worth more than say $50 or $100.”

In a recent USA Today rebuttal to Summers’ idea, Reynolds reiterates why this would be a very, very bad plan.

He writes:

The Federal Reserve and various other financial regulatory bodies were sold politically in no small part as protections against inflation. But inflation has run rampant. According to the inflation calculator, today’s $100 bill is worth only as much as $4.18 in 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was established. When you realize that inflation helps debtors and that governments are the world’s biggest debtors, this makes a certain amount of sense — for them.

But at a time when, almost no matter where you look in the world, the parts of it controlled by the experts and technocrats (like Larry Summers) seem to be doing badly, it seems reasonable to ask: Why give them still more control over the economy? What reason is there to think that they’ll use that control fairly, or even competently? Their track record isn’t very impressive.

Cash has a lot of virtues. One of them is that it allows people to engage in voluntary transactions without the knowledge or permission of anyone else. Governments call this suspicious, but the rest of us call it something else: Freedom.

In other words, cash is an important tool if you value the modicum of financial freedom you have left in a world where wealth is increasingly thought of as easy to track numbers on a screen.
If you want to know more, Bob Livingston recently wrote an extremely informative article about the powerful voices behind efforts to take away cash as an option for average Americans: Why there’s a war on cash; it’s about central banks consolidating power

Will Government Seize Your 401(k)?

ECONOMIST: GOVERNMENT PREPARING TO SEIZE 401(K) PENSIONS

Supreme Court ruling sets the stage for "economic totalitarianism"

by PAUL JOSEPH WATSON | MAY 25, 2015

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Economist Martin Armstrong warns that a Supreme Court ruling last week has set the stage for the federal government to begin seizing private pension funds.

According to Armstrong, the outcome of Tibble v. Edison, which found that employers have a duty to protect their workers’ 401(k) plans from mutual funds that perform poorly, will grease the skids for the feds to seize private funds and prosecute companies who manage mutual funds badly.

“Between the court ruling and the Obama administration’s push for stronger fiduciary rules,” the developments send a, “strong message that government can much easier seize the pension fund management industry of course to “protect the consumer,” writes Armstrong, warning that the ruling, “sets the stage to JUSTIFY government seizure of private pension funds to protect pensioners,” when the economy gets “messy”.

“This fits perfectly just in time for the Obama administration’s next assault as they prepare a landmark change of its own by issuing rules requiring that financial advisers put the interest of customers ahead of their own,” writes Armstrong. “This creates a very gray area wide enough to justify public seizure of pension funds under management.”

Following the 2008 financial collapse, reports emerged that the federal government was planning to seize the private 401(k) pensions of millions of Americans while enforcing an additional 5 per cent payroll tax as part of a new bailout program that would empower the Social Security Administration to redistribute pension funds “fairly” amongst citizens.

Armstrong warns that the development is part of a wider move towards “economic totalitarianism,” which is also characterized by efforts to eliminate physical cash altogether in the name of giving central banks more power.

Numerous prominent individuals have called for hard currency to be banned in recent months, including former Bank of England economist Jim Leaviss, who wrote a piece for the Telegraph which argued that, “Forcing everyone to spend only by electronic means from an account held at a government-run bank would give the authorities far better tools to deal with recessions and economic booms.”

Earlier this month, German Council Of Economic expert Peter Bofinger also said that imposing a cashless society would make it easier for central banks to enforce their economic policy.

As we have covered at length, commercial banks are beginning to impose more draconian controls on the withdrawal and depositing of cash, with the practice being treated as a suspicious activity even for relatively modest sums.

Armstrong, who correctly predicted the 1987 Black Monday crash as well as the 1998 Russian financial collapse, also warned last year that a coming financial collapse will cause widespread riots to erupt in America by 2016.

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