The Cashless Society - The End Game and the End of Individual Property Rights
The main distinction between a free-enterprise capitalist system, and its opposite, has to do with property rights.
In a free society individual citizens have the right to property ownership. In a collectivist society (Socialism, Communism, Fascism) – only the collective owns and/or controls all property (including labor) – and then “distributes” wealth as the ruling class of that society sees fit. This is only logical. Under free enterprise capitalism –where individual actors are free to transact with one another voluntarily and by mutual consent—those actors can only trade or sell that which they own. You can’t just sell your neighbor’s property or conscript their labor without their consent. The former is theft, and the latter slavery.
But history has demonstrated that Socialist governments both steal and enslave. Therefore, for a government to “redistribute wealth” under any form of socialism – individual property rights must be eradicated.
This distinction seems to escape most people. To state this principle more simply, a free enterprise economic system requires a respect for individual property rights; a socialist economic system requires there be no individual property rights.
The Back Story
All property — whether we’re talking about your land, your home, or your labor— has a value. That value is measured in terms of the monetary system over which that economy functions. There are only two kinds of money – fiat money, and sound money. Sound money (under a precious metal standard such as gold or silver) protects your property rights, because it has intrinsic value, so its purchasing power is stable and the resultant value of your property (and of your labor) is determined solely by the individual actors in the free market – supply and demand. Fiat money on the other hand is created as debt. Every unit of fiat money created, is owed back to the issuer—plus interest. As such, under a fiat monetary system, all of your property (and your labor) that is valued in terms of that fiat money – is actually controlled by the lender (through inflation and interest rate manipulation). Under an inflationary fiat money system, supply and demand is deliberately distorted, surreptitiously giving the issuer power over your labor and your property.
These economic distortions are evidenced by the many “market-specific inflations” (such as the housing bubble for example), which have been deliberately foisted upon the middle class as means to destroy home-ownership—while at the same time—when coupled with unfair taxation on labor compensation – surreptitiously conscripts individual labor.
Many Americans believe that it was Richard Nixon who took the US Dollar "off the gold standard" in 1971, when he rescinded the Bretton-Woods Agreement. This is not so. It was in 1933, when FDR took the US Dollar off of the “gold standard,” that our currency was converted from Sound money - “United States Dollars” into Fiat money - “Federal Reserve Notes.” From that time until 1971, the US dollar was on what was known as "The Gold Exchange Standard." Explaining that is beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, all the reader needs to know is that since 1933 – our government and their corrupt partners in the Federal Reserve System have printed fake money, expanding the “money supply” to astronomical proportions. This is what is called “inflation.”
Most people believe that inflation is “rising prices” but this understanding reverses cause and effect. In truth, the word “inflation” denotes “inflating” or expanding the supply of money. This causes every existing unit of money to be diluted in terms of its purchasing power. The consequence is that it takes more money units to buy the same goods or services as before – giving the appearance of rising prices.
The goods and services you’re purchasing are the same. Their intrinsic value has not changed. If you’ve lived in the same home for the past 10 years –it’s the same home—it hasn’t changed in terms of its utility or REAL value to you. But its price may have doubled in that time. This reveals that under our fiat monetary system – price and value are not the same thing. Price is always manipulated and perverted under fiat money.
In spite of the fact that the US Federal Reserve Note has lost 98% of its purchasing power since 1933, banks are still required to act with at least some minimal level of discipline. They are still somewhat restricted in their fraudulent fractional-reserve lending practices – due to the reserve requirement to which they are subject. This means that all commercial banks in America are obligated to keep at least 10% of their depositors’ cash on-hand (so they can only “loan out” 90% of their depositors’ money. This is in order that if some depositors come to take out some of their cash – the bank will have some available to return to depositors.
Given this understanding, “we the people” should now be asking ourselves this question: “Why over the past few years, have we begun to witness the emergence of a war on cash?”
The Cashless Society
As with every other insidious Socialist policy and institution that has surreptitiously infiltrated the US economy over the past 100 years, we are now starting to hear more propaganda touting a movement to eliminate cash-money altogether – and move us toward a “cashless society.” The first thing the reader must understand – is that the only REAL cash – is sound money. Fiat money is not cash – it is counterfeit. Second, all of the economic ills our country has faced over the past few generations are a direct consequence of the dysfunctions that occur under a fiat monetary model (which is a fundamentally Marxist construct). So why would those with power over our system (which has been deliberately misrepresented as “free enterprise capitalism”) want to go to a cashless society?
You can count on being indoctrinated by the mainstream media that this would be for your benefit. But as with all things that have been shoved down our throats by our government, you can bet it is for the opposite purpose.
What will be the consequences?
It will mean a permanent end to individual property rights, and the final nail in the coffin of the freeenterprise system upon which America was founded. America abandoned sound money, and with it real Free Enterprise Capitalism a century ago. However, there still exists the possibility to restore Free Markets and The Constitution.
Moving to a cashless society, however, will make this impossible. The clandestine and incremental slide toward centrally controlled Socialist-Fascism will be complete, and irreversible. Unless you want your children, grandchildren, and every generation thereafter to suffer immeasurably — a life of perpetual inescapable servitude — you must resist the cashless society with every fiber of your being. There are several reasons for this.
With the growth of the surveillance-based police state, imagine for a moment the consequences of being deprived of any anonymity whatsoever, for every transaction no matter how seemingly insignificant. Without cash, you will have no choice but to involve a “financial institution” to process all of your electronic transactions. Never again will you be able to sell your used television to your neighbor without government interference. Just conducting a garage sale will require you to first obtain permission from the government as well as access to a bank’s electronic transfer services — for a fee of course. You will not be able to buy a stick of gum without paying a transaction fee for doing so.
Every transaction you make will be recorded electronically and data-mined for your preferences, your lifestyle, your whereabouts at any moment, and your every decision. The transaction fees you pay will cover the government’s cost of controlling you. This is the concept of “feeding the beast”—on steroids. The information that will be available to governments when no one can buy or sell anything without going through a bank is big government’s dream come true.
Imagine ordering a pizza and bottle of Coke to be delivered to your home. Three minutes after your order has been delivered and your e-money account has been debited, you receive a phone call from your health-insurance provider. The premiums you pay for this health policy are deducted from your wages automatically — without your consent — since you are obligated by law to have this “insurance”. A pleasant electronically generated female voice on the other end says, “Mr. Smith, the pizza and soda you are about to consume have been proven to be a leading cause of heart-disease. Since your most recent quarterly health screening showed elevated triglycerides and HDL cholesterol, you must be advised that your health insurance premiums will be raised by 7.5%. For your convenience, this will automatically be deducted from your account on the next business day. Have a nice day and enjoy your pizza.”
This is not hyperbole. This kind of blackmail via data-mining is already being practiced by insurance providers of all kinds. And this scenario is only the tip of the iceberg. An even greater threat that will be imposed by the cashless society is relatively unknown to most Americans — even the ones who are paying attention.
Consider the fact that banks today are forced to have at least some modicum discipline in their lending policy due to the requirement they hold 10% of their depositors’ cash in reserve as physical cash. Most people understand the concept that a “run on the banks” occurs when all depositors try to withdraw their money at the same time, and the bank lacks enough physical cash to satisfy its liabilities.
When physical money no longer exists, the reserve requirement becomes irrelevant since there will no longer be any real money to put on reserve. There can be no risk of a bank run when there is nothing at the bank to run after. In fact, no one will “withdraw money” ever again. Every transaction you make will be “processed” electronically by a computer. Banks will merely create as much electronic money as they need to satisfy the demands of their “depositors” as well as borrowers. With no reserve requirement, banks will be absolved of any fiscal discipline whatsoever.
They will then also be absolved of paying any interest to depositors. Negative interest rates on deposits will become the norm. In other words, you will pay the bank for the privilege of managing your electronic deposits rather than the bank paying you interest for holding and re-lending your money. Banks can then write loans to all comers and expand the money supply to infinity. All it will take is a few keystrokes on a computer keyboard. Hyperinflation will be the result.
Unintended Consequences (or intended perhaps?)
Restrictions on transactions that will come into effect will be disguised as benefits of the cashless society. Parents will be lured into embracing the notion that their 17 year old will be unable to buy liquor using a fake ID, since their smart phone, or perhaps worse – the chip implanted in their wrist – will be programmed to prohibit them from buying any. In fact, the ruling class will be able to program your card or chip with whatever transactional restrictions they like, without having to pass a law to do so. The technology is already there to modify your purchasing restrictions anytime the rulers see fit. Did you write a “letter to the editor” criticizing your State Governor for his recent transgressions with a highschool cheerleader? You may find that your unfavorable commentary about a political official has led to your chip being disabled for purchasing your weekly insulin supply, until you print a retraction and apology.
If your electronic “fed-coin,” smart phone, or chip is not programmed to let you buy a certain thing, how will you get it? You don’t have cash anymore and no one would accept it if you did. In that case, you can forget about the 2nd Amendment. Gun registration will be unnecessary, since the leftists in charge of the banking aristocracy will disable any transaction for a firearm from ever being able to take place. As always, criminals will still easily obtain guns and drugs through illegal barter, but you won’t – since you’re not a criminal.
The cashless society will be sold to the American people as a “convenience,” as a “more secure form of payment,” as your patriotic duty, or as some other nonsense.
Conditioning The People for Slavery
This is one of the little known reasons for having had artificially low interest rates for such an extended period of time. The financial “industry” has done this partly to allow normalcy bias to set in on the current generation. They have been conditioning people with the idea that being paid nothing in interest for your “savings” deposits should be normal. Once they move to negative interest rates — paying the bank interest and fees to “manage your deposits” — few people will object and many might not even notice.
In February, 2016, the makers of the classic board game Monopoly announced that the game will no longer feature paper cash. Players will instead have an electronic “bank card,” like a debit card. The process of using games like this to condition children and youth with the idea that cash is “antiquated” is already underway, not only in board games, but even in school. Most public school lunch programs have now disallowed the use of cash for children to buy their lunches. Unwitting parents see this as convenient and safer. However, children are being inculcated starting in the first grade that a swipe card is the same as money. By the time they are adults, they won’t even know how to count change for a cash purchase.
The outcome of the cashless society will be unrestrained hyperinflation and a rapid expansion of poverty. Just trying to feed your children and keep a roof over their heads will constitute “living beyond your means.” The new normal will mean that the most basic standard of living will be not be affordable without using a vast amount of debt.
If you want to try to start your own small business – one that may compete against some bankcontrolled corporate behemoth – forget it. You, your children, grandchildren — every successive generation — will be forced into employment and debt servitude from the time you are able to work for your first electronic nickel, until you’re too old and decrepit to walk to the toilet by yourself. By the end of your life, you’ll have no real assets of any kind. It will mark the permanent end of individual property rights—forever.
You will never be able to object to this system once it’s been put in place. If you exercise your first amendment right to free speech by saying something the government (or the bank) doesn’t like — you will likely find yourself deprived of the ability to conduct any transaction at all. In fact, once this economic catastrophe has been shoved down our throats — the Constitution and Bill of Rights will become completely irrelevant artifacts. Once the cashless society has been fully implemented—it will be impossible to reverse it and restore sound money—as the Constitution requires.
The end result — Miserable, Abject, Global Slavery.
This isn’t some hypothetical futuristic conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy fact – and it is already being implemented right now. It’s important that the American people understand the grave implications of this “last-straw” in the long and surreptitious eradication of our property rights. Consider the fact that there is not a single mention of this (or of property rights in general) by any political candidate who sought elected office during this most recent current election cycle. There is a reason that these facts are being ignored by the media, and obscured from the public.
Implementing The Cashless Society Is Secretly Underway
All over the world, it is starting with subtle capital controls being enacted by government agencies and commercial banks, as well as through changes to the currency system. For example, in the US city of New Orleans, the local government decided to stop accepting cash payments from drivers at the Office of Motor Vehicles. Several branches of Citibank in Australia have stopped dealing in cash altogether. India recently demonetized its two largest denominations of cash, leaving the entire country in economic chaos. A few weeks later, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers published an article stating that “nothing in the Indian experience gives us pause in recommending that no more large notes be created in the United States, Europe, and around the world.” Summers has long advocated for putting an end to the $100 bill.
JP Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the U.S., has recently enacted a policy restricting the use of cash in selected markets. Chase has banned cash payments for credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans; and they have disallowed the storage of “any cash or coins” in safe deposit boxes. The war on property rights has moved from one of words—to a war of actions.
Here are several recent and very alarming quotes that should chill any individual who cherishes his or her freedom and anonymity:
- “Despite advances in transaction technologies, paper currency still constitutes a notable percentage of the money supply in most countries… Yet, it has important drawbacks. First, it can help facilitate activity in the underground (tax-evading) and illegal economy. Second, its existence creates the artifact of the zero bound on the nominal interest rate.” -- Kenneth Rogoff (from the intro to his paper The Costs and Benefits to Phasing Out Paper Currency)
In other words, cash (not money) is the source of all evil and must be destroyed because governments can’t trace its every movement, and it represents a limiting factor on central banks’ ability to continue their insane negative-interest-rate experiment.
“This cost has to be seen against the cost that the anonymity of currency presents to society. Even though hard evidence is hard to come by, it is very likely that the underground economy and the criminal community are among the heaviest users of currency. This, I believe, is the hidden intent behind all the excited talk about banning cash: to do away with the personal anonymity it offers.” -- Citigroup‘s Chief Economist Willem Buiter
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders, France‘s finance minister Michel Sapin started scaremongering by blaming the attacks on the assailants’ ability to buy dangerous things with cash. Shortly thereafter he announced the implementation of capital controls that included a €1,000 cap on cash payments, down from €3,000. He claimed that such radical measures were necessary to “fight against the use of cash and anonymity in the French economy.”
In his article: “The Great Advantage of a Cashless World,” Guillermo de la Dehesa,a Spanish economist, and current international advisor to Banco Santander and of course -- Goldman Sachs, writes: “Without cash, we would live in a much safer, less violent world with enhanced social cohesion, since the major incentive fueling all illegal activity [i.e. cash]… would disappear.”
Dehesa also lamented that political authorities in all countries were incapable of taking this “transcendental step” to build a “safer and fairer world, in which there will be a reduced need for public and private policing and fewer wars, terrorist attacks, and burglaries, and drugs could only be bought legally.” With this deliberately misleading claim, he ludicrously elevated cash (rather than sound money) as a major cause of war and a laundry list of other evils.”
In fact, the opposite is true. The enormous scale of wars over the past century have only been made possible by the existence of fiat money. An economy based on sound money, could never afford to wage war on the scale we have seen over the past 100 years, because no country could then simply print money as debt – thereby conscripting the future labor of all of its citizens to pay for it. Dehesa’s comment reveals either a completely perverse understanding of economics, or a deliberate obfuscation of the truth – in order to usher in such a corrupt system.
Economist and former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, enthusiastically opined on a recent CBS news interview: “There will be a time – I don’t know when, I can’t give you a date – when physical money is just going to cease to exist.”
“Everyone thinks cash is so simple and so easy and so fast and so secure. It’s NONE of those things. It’s really expensive to move it, store it, secure it, inspect it, shred it, redesign it, re-supply it, and round and round we go!” --- David Wolman, author of The End of Money, in an interview with CBS on why he believes that cash is so impractical (not to mention unhygienic, or as he puts it “pretty gross”).
In the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s 2015 annual letter: “The technologies are all in place; it’s just a question of getting us to use them so we can all benefit from a crimeless, privacy-free world. What better place to conduct a massive social experiment than sub-Saharan Africa, where NGOs and GOs (Government Organizations) are working hand-in-hand with banks and telecom companies to replace cash with mobile money alternatives?
The letter goes on to explain: “Because there is strong demand for banking among the poor, and because the poor can in fact be a profitable customer base, entrepreneurs in developing countries are doing exciting work – some of which will “trickle up” to developed countries over time.”
What the Foundation doesn’t mention is that it is heavily invested in many of Africa’s mobile-money initiatives and in 2010 teamed up with the World Bank to “improve financial data collection” among Africa’s poor. One also wonders how much Microsoft will one day profit from the Foundation’s frontline role in getting a piece of every transaction from the abject poor and destitute of these third-world countries. Every time an impoverished African woman manages to scrape up enough electronic credits to buy her baby a bottle of milk, Bill Gates will happily “earn” a 2% commission on her transaction – as will a few other parasites from government and international banking.
- Citi -- a big player in the African arena -- recently launched a partnership with USAID aimed at accelerating mobile money adoption in developing countries. From their joint press release: Expanding the adoption of mobile financial solutions is a critical economic development strategy with the potential to drive growth and increase financial access and security for the developing world’s poor population. The effort seeks to strengthen alternatives to a cash-based system that is inefficient, costly, and prone to corruption. [Anything that allows individuals to conduct transactions without the parasites in government or banks being able to cut themselves in on the action – is considered “corrupt”]
The move to a cashless society is clearly the end-game of the ruling class. The political and financial elites are now starting to put out all kinds of propaganda to try and lure the unwitting public to get on board with that agenda. They make false claims suggesting that large denomination bills are only used in criminal enterprise like the drug trade (ignoring the fact that crime data completely contradicts this assertion).
As a result of technological advances and generational priorities, unless the hardworking people—not just of America, but of the entire world—actively object and lobby their politicians with a vocal rejection of this concept—cash’s days are numbered. The move to a cashless society is clearly the end-game of the ruling class. Don Quijones, editor of “Wolf St.” writes: “there is a whole world of difference between a natural death and euthanasia. It is now clear that an extremely powerful, albeit loose, alliance of governments, banks, central banks, large corporations, and NGOs are determined to pull the plug on cash — not for our benefit, but for theirs.”
As Quijones warned in his article: We Are Sleepwalking Towards a Cashless Society, “we (or at least the vast majority of people in the vast majority of countries) are willing to entrust government and financial institutions – organizations that have already betrayed just about every possible notion of trust – with complete control over our every single daily transaction. And all for the sake of a few minor gains in convenience. The price we pay will be what remains of our individual freedom and privacy. By Don Quijones, Raging Bull-Shit.
He went on to state correctly, yet ominously: “by far the biggest risk posed by digital alternatives to cash such as mobile money is the potential for massive concentration of financial power and the abuses and conflicts of interest that would almost certainly ensue. Naturally it goes without saying that most of the institutions that will rule the digital money space will be the very same institutions — institutions like HSBC — that have already broken pretty much every rule in the financial service rule book. They have manipulated virtually every market in existence; they have commodified and financialized pretty much every natural resource of value on this planet; and in the wake of the financial crisis which they almost single-handedly caused, they have extorted billions of dollars from the pockets of their own customers and trillions from hard-up taxpayers.”
By the end of 2012, only about 8% of the total money supply existed as physical paper and coin. The recent years of “quantitative easing,” most of which was electronic money creation, has reduced this proportion even further. The looming danger to individual property rights is not just alarming for Americans, but for every industrialized nation on Earth.
Governments and huge corporations have several things in common: they want to know everything you do, they want to take your labor and pay you little or nothing for it. They ultimately want to take everything you have ever worked for and saved and turn you into a rent-paying wage slave with no savings and no assets.
Data is power. When money is only data – whoever controls the server – controls you and your life.
Technologies for collecting, mining, and using data are now so cheap that even the totally impoverished nation of Somalia has turned into the model of just this sort of cashless society. The goal of the global banking aristocracy and their corrupt partners in various governments around the world – is to turn every nation on Earth, into a slave-state modelled on present-day Somalia—which has become their beta-test for global cashless debt slavery.
The greatest risk posed by a purely digital money system will be the massive concentration of financial power that will be wielded by the cancerous partnership between the government and The Federal Reserve. The abuses and conflicts of interest that will certainly ensue will make the housing bubble and consequent “financial crisis” seem like an irrelevant speed bump.
The Hidden Agenda of Davos — 2016
Each year, there is an annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Leaders in business, government, and media attend to discuss the big economic issues of the day. Several contrarian economists have alleged that 2016’s event, which took place from January 17th to the 20th, included a secret meeting which took place during the conference behind the scenes
Immediately after the conference, there was a massive push to accelerate the elimination of cash, starting with high-denomination currency notes. A flood of articles from The New York Times, The Economist, Zero Hedge, and other publications mentioned this. A few days after the Davos Forum, the head of the Japanese central bank implemented negative interest rates for the first time in history. This was after he repeatedly denied that he would ever implement negative rates. Perhaps something said during Davos influenced his decision. After the conference, the CEOs of Deutsche Bank and Norway’s largest bank both called for the elimination of cash. Bloomberg published a piece called "Bring on the Cashless Future." Financial Times published a similar article. Shortly afterward, Harvard University published a paper espousing the need to eliminate high-value paper currencies, like the $100 bill and the €500 note. All of these events took place within the 6 weeks following the Davos meeting putting negative interest rates and the war on cash into overdrive.
Here in the US, the Fed has printed trillions of dollars and has run out of policy tools with which to continue propping up their phony fiat money system. Interest rates are zero and soon will have to go negative in an effort to continue artificially stimulating the consumption economy. This will be impossible without banning cash. To go cashless, the Fed will have to come up with a new “currency.” It will be an electronic currency or “Fed-coin” whose purpose will be to trap all savings in the banking system. It will be the ultimate wealth confiscation and control tool.
Moving to the Cashless society will be a turning point in Global history, the unintended consequences of which will be devastating to the middle class, and worse—will be irreversible.
What Is the Link Between Negative Interest Rates and The War on Cash?
With negative interest rates, most people will take their money out of the bank and put it under a mattress rather than suffer having to pay a penalty or a tax on saving money. The economic central planners know this, and have therefore accelerated their war on cash, along with the spread of negative interest rates around the world.
I’ve already pointed out that there is not a large volume of actual paper cash residing in banks. Since fractional reserve lending has allowed banks to loan the same money to hundreds of different borrowers, most of the “money” exists as digital bytes on a computer. If people start pulling paper money out of the banks en masse, it won't take much to collapse the entire system. They want to impose the cashless society onto the people before most realize and understand the realities of this situation and start a run on the banks before they are ready. Implementing it will take time, so their solution is to make accessing cash increasingly more difficult, and in some cases, illegal. In France, for example, it’s now illegal to do cash transactions over €1,000 without documenting it properly. That keeps cash in the banking systems. That makes the banks happy because if you are prohibited from withdrawing your cash, there can’t be a bank run.
The cashless society is the IRS's dream come true: total knowledge of, and control over, the finances of every single American.
— Former Congressman Dr. Ron Paul
Fellow citizens—the war on cash is a war against you—against your very freedom. Unless you reject this push toward the cashless society with every fiber of your being — you’d better Pucker Up — because The Worst is Yet to Come — courtesy of the criminals you have embraced as your “leaders.” Accepting such a system is tantamount to deliberately relegating your children and all future generations, to inescapable servitude, bound and subjugated to the sociopaths you have allowed to take-over your government and banking institutions.
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How the big banks (Too big to fail) and governments, like the test case in India, are trying to make use cashless. Freedoms cannot be lost, as we need to go back to gold backed currencies to keep budgets in check.
Excellent post! Just articulates how close we are to the edge and most are blissfully unaware. The next financial crisis will lead to negative interest rates and a ban on cash. With the Fed hiking rates and now talking about shrinking its balance sheet, it may be closer than we think :(
It's too bad the financier of communism is always going to be capitalism. If a system doesn't help those that support it,what good is it?
Are still scared of a cashless society. I get that tyrants want to implement it for absolute control. They have for decades. Cryptocurrency pretty much fucks that plan up. A cashless society will be their demise, not ours.