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Home Front: Culture Wars
COVID-19 and the War on Cash: What Is Behind the Push for a Cashless Society?
2020-04-15
[The EU is big into this, too, probably more so.]
[Rutherford] Cash may well become a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There’s been talk about this for decades, but I don’t see it happening — there are always people and reasons for some to use cash, at least sometimes. And I don’t know about anyone else, but I intend to keep more cash on hand in case of emergencies going forward. In a real emergency, credit cards/digital wallets might not be a possibility.
As these COVID-19 lockdowns drag out, more and more individuals and businesses are going cashless (for convenience and in a so-called effort to avoid spreading coronavirus germs), engaging in online commerce or using digital forms of currency (bank cards, digital wallets, etc.). As a result, physical cash is no longer king.
Posted by:Clem

#17  /\ I have also heard that money was always Iran's, which was frozen with the hostage crisis and unfrozen by Barry.
Posted by: Clem   2020-04-15 19:21  

#16  #10 Of course, don't forget cash is used by terrorists, organized crime, and drug runners.

Osama Bin Obama's pallets of cash to Iran?
Posted by: Woodrow   2020-04-15 19:15  

#15  Bitcoin is the drug dealers', scammers' and terrorists preferred digital vehicle. Nothing uniquely bad about cash.
Posted by: Lex   2020-04-15 15:47  

#14  Yes, a society that has a single point of failure in electronic transfers is a society waiting to return to the barter system. Practical experience in wake of numerous hurricane ravaged sections of the country should have killed any mention of this racket.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2020-04-15 15:35  

#13  And one German virologist says it is rubbish that you can catch CV from surfaces, even, e.g., door knobs. I don't buy the statist hype.
Posted by: Clem   2020-04-15 13:49  

#12  Just think how dirty your debit card is after you stick it into the same promiscuous hole that every other john uses.

C'mon, people. The disease vector is China.
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2020-04-15 13:45  

#11  You can buy pre-paid visas that are completely anonymous. I suspect that's next.

And when the power goes out we'll be back to a medieval barter economy.
Posted by: rjschwarz   2020-04-15 13:13  

#10  Of course, don't forget cash is used by terrorists, organized crime, and drug runners.

But that's the excuse. Now money is all of a sudden a disease vector? I don't buy it. Besides, soooo many people use plastic now (even to buy a cup of coffee) that cash use isn't what it used to be.

Big gov't wants to track every penny, period. Imagine also how much money central banks can "print" if it's all 0's and 1's.
Posted by: Clem   2020-04-15 11:22  

#9  What is this war on cash?

Disease vector.
Easy to launder.
Off books payments are tax-free.
Posted by: Skidmark   2020-04-15 10:58  

#8  AlanC - I got out of high school in 1982 and saw my first punch card at the Engineering building at UNH a few months later. I was undeclared at the time so I wasn't steeped in the geek culture for a few more years, once I bought a IBM PC - dual floppy disks with a whopping 480 KB of memory. My first upgrade was putting in nine memory chips to bring it to 640 KB - it was wicked fast, at the time.
Posted by: Raj   2020-04-15 10:50  

#7  a cashless society‐easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and locked down‐would play right into the hands of the government (and its corporate partners.

To say nothing of the possibility of your accounts being hacked. Or drained on a whim if you are on the wrong side of politics.
Posted by: JohnQC   2020-04-15 10:35  

#6  When Puerto Rico had no power after the hurricanes, electronic stuff like ATM's and debit cards did not help much, did they? But this is all about control with Big Brother wanting to know where every thin dime is going.
Posted by: Clem   2020-04-15 08:26  

#5  Raj, you're either younger than I thought or haven't been listening, which I doubt.

When I joined DEC (that's Digital Equipment Corp. for you young-uns) the corporate buzzword was "Paper free in '83". Didn't work out too well then though the effort was made.
Posted by: AlanC   2020-04-15 08:14  

#4  It's a similar argument to the crap I've been hearing for about two decades now, and that is the 'paperless office'. I've cut my own (CPA) stuff down from about 10,000 pages a year to about half that, but paper cannot be eliminated. This is the wet dream of the globalist crowd, so fuck 'em with a 5 iron.
Posted by: Raj   2020-04-15 07:44  

#3  There's always cowrie shells
Posted by: KBK   2020-04-15 00:55  

#2  Must have: cash, candles, H2O, generators, dried and canned goods, batteries, flashlight, sharp pointed objects.
Optional: plastic.
Posted by: Lex   2020-04-15 00:43  

#1  IOW: Socialism?
Posted by: gorb   2020-04-15 00:25  

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