Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog, [6]
Earlier this week, as the financial world was mesmerized by a min-stock market crash, the Financial Times published a dastardly little piece of fascist propaganda.
There is no more egregious anti-liberty economic policy imaginable than banning cash. I covered this earlier in the year in the post, Martin Armstrong Reports on a Secret Meeting in London to Ban Cash [7]. Here’s an excerpt:
At this point, anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention to the central planning economic totalitarians running the fraudulent global financial system is aware of the blatant push in the media to acclimate the masses to accepting a “cashless society.”
In the mind of an economic tyrant, banning cash represents the holy grail. Forcing the plebs onto a system of digital fiat currency transactions offers total control via a seamless tracking of all transactions in the economy, and the ability to block payments if an uppity citizen dares get out of line.
While we’ve all seen the idiotic arguments for banning cash, i.e., it will allow central planners to more efficiently centrally plan economies into the ground, Martin Armstrong is reporting on a secret meeting in London with the aim of getting rid of any economic privacy that remains by ending cash.
Three months later, the Financial Times publishes an article titled, The Case for Retiring Another “Barbarous Relic.” [8] When you start to see increased propaganda about banning cash, you know the status quo is very scared and things are getting very serious. You’ve been warned.
From the FT [8]:
The fact that people treat cash as the go-to safe asset [9] when banks are teetering is heavy with historical irony. Paper money was once the symbol of monetary irresponsibility. But even as individuals have taken recent crises as reasons to stock up on banknotes, authorities would do well to consider the arguments for phasing out their use as another “barbarous relic”, the moniker Keynes gave to gold.
Already, by far the largest amount of money exists and is transacted in electronic form — as bank deposits and central bank reserves. But even a little physical currency can cause a lot of distortion to the economic system.
So what about the reasoning for ending people’s ability to physically hold on to their own money? Wait, you’ll never guess, yes, it’s apparently necessary in order to give the least democratic, most destructive entities on planet earth, Central Banks, more power.
The existence of cash — a bearer instrument with a zero interest rate — limits central banks’ ability to stimulate a depressed economy. The worry is that people will change their deposits for cash if a central bank moves rates into negative territory. The Swiss, Danish and Swedish central banks have pushed rates lower than many thought possible; but most policymakers still believe in an “effective” lower band not far below zero.
Naturally, it’s all about state power, control and the ability to make sure the slave population is easily and efficiently milked.
Electronic money also permits innovations to reward law-abiding businesses. Value added tax, for example, could be automatically levied — and reimbursed — in real time on transactions between liable bank accounts. Countries that struggle with tax collection could go a long way in solving their problems by restricting the use of cash. Greece, in particular, could make lemonade out of lemons, using the current capital controls to push the country’s cash culture into new habits.
Of course, if cash were involuntarily”ended,” there would be a surge in demand for physical gold and silver, which would then necessitate a ban on those items. Then the cycle of economic and financial tyranny would be complete, and crawling our way out of it, nearly impossible.
