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RE: The Push Towards a Cashless Controlled Society
The government (the bankers enforcement branch) has went out of their way to dis-incentivize the use of cash, from confiscations over certain amounts, to the need to report over certain amounts. The I-10 corridor has many horror stories of cops confiscating cash from unsuspecting travelers and releasing them on their way, forcing them to come back and sue for their money back.
Then you look at the licenses they make the public get to transact in cash, some areas even requiring it for a yard sale or a kids lemonade stand. Not sure how even the most ignorant of citizens can still call this the land of the free.
In my opinion we are still free to a large and enviable extent, just much less free than - I think you'll agree - is rightly American.
The USA is not yet Switzerland, where physical notes are not legal tender and capital sitting in a bank account is taxed to incentivize spending. But the USA is also not the PRC, where banning cash is simply impossible b/c of the culture and the nature of the economy, even whilst there digital banking is almost indispensable in some commerce and all civic services. I would guess that the path the USA takes will be a little of these both. Without crypto, however, it would tend more towards the example of Switzerland, unless the American ethos of individual sovereignty and liberty over everything else drys up too.
Things can be worse for sure, and they can be better. More or less freedom isn't true freedom. We have work to do.
To be honest, I think the ideal of the absolute and total freedom of the individual is misguided and humanly and logically impossible. Each one of us would have to be God but only one could ever be omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient.
Was it Rousseau or Voltaire who remarked that liberty is the realization that you have responsibilities? I think popular understanding needs to work back to that conception of liberty-responsibility. There is a lot of work to do, for sure.
Yup, the "law" and total control, gotta get a permit to sell lemonade kids!