Daisy Luther – The Organic Prepper Aug 23, 2020
Have you ever thought about the ramifications of a cashless society? I’m talking about the real, first-person effects, not some ephemeral conspiracy theory or possible biblical prophecy. This is bad news for a lot of reasons, not the least of which are the ways it would affect day-to-day life.
Here’s my definition of a cashless society, so we’re all singing from the same songbook:
Cash would no longer be legal tender, therefore you could not make purchases with it, pay bills with it, or spend it in any way. You would not be able to deposit cash into your bank account so you wouldn’t be able to accept cash for an exchange of goods or services.
Therefore, cash would be nothing more than a worthless piece of paper. (I know, I know. Debt-based currency is a totally different article though.)
We’re heading this way. Jose recently wrote that Venezuela is rapidly becoming cashless, and here in the United States a concerning early sign is that there is a “change shortage” which is causing many stores to give you your change on a store loyalty card or invite you to donate that change to some cause.
Gifts
Think of all the times that cash is an appropriate gift. I’ve always given money, like stuffing a child’s birthday card with a $20 bill or giving a new graduate some cash to put toward college expenses. When I got married, we received quite a bit of money from various loved ones. My dad always gave my daughters some spending money of their own each time we visited and they were surprised and delighted every single time.
However, in a cashless society, there are two problems with this.
First of all, the recipient would not be able to use the cash. He or she would not be able to spend or deposit it.
Secondly, if a monetary gift is given, it would have to be done with a check or electronic transfer. This means that the government (and the Tax Man) would know precisely how much money any person is given. That might not be a big deal for the 7-year-old who got $20 from grandpa, but what about the graduate who raked in a couple thousand in gifts from family members to celebrate his or her accomplishments? At what point will the government have their hands out for “their fair share?”
Side Gigs
A lot of folks are really struggling right now with the COVID shutdowns. Jobs have been lost, hours have been cut, and financial problems abound. One of the ways that these people are making ends meet is with side gigs. Folks are cutting grass, cleaning houses, driving for Uber, delivering food, babysitting – they’re coming up with all sorts of ways to make some extra money. A huge percentage of these people are being paid in cash.
But if suddenly you can no longer spend your cash, you’d need to be paid electronically. How many people who don’t already have a business have a merchant account for taking credit or debit cards? There are options like PayPal and Venmo, which take a percentage fee, but they’re going to have to figure out something.
And then, as above, every single bit of this side gig money is traceable and trackable. This could quickly turn your 20 bucks from lawn mowing into $15 after taxes.
Selling Secondhand Goods
Raise your hand if you’ve ever sold something to pay a bill. Me too! I’ve sold jewelry, furniture, exercise equipment – all sorts of stuff to meet an obligation when in a pinch. Not only that, but I have a yard sale every single year to downsize the things that I found I don’t really use, which often brings in a few hundred dollars.
How will this work in a cashless society? Well, if you are selling just one larger item, you’d probably end up using some kind of payment app like Venmo or PayPal. On the other hand, a yard sale would be nearly impossible to conduct electronically. Who is really going to be able to sit there and do PayPal transactions all day, especially when folks are buying things that cost 25 cents?
And there we are, down another way of making some quick money.
Tips
Lots of folks who work in food service and the beauty industry, just to name two niches, depend on tips to make a living. Generally, tips are collected from tables or paid out at the end of the shift if they were put on a debit card. But…once there is no cash, these tips will have to end up going on a regular paycheck. One hundred percent of this money will be subject to payroll withholdings.
This will mean that a lot of people see a sharp decrease in their earnings, plus they’ll have to wait for their checks to get the money. It puts a lot of power into the hands of the management and it would not be difficult at all for someone to manipulate the amounts the workers have earned.
Children
I’ve written many times about the importance of allowing children to handle their own money. It teaches them responsibility and life skills that will serve them well in the future. (Learn more about talking to your kids about money in this article.) My daughters have had access to money since they were in kindergarten, and possibly before.
Now, how are you going to give a five year old access to money if it’s all electronic? Are they going to end up with their own bank accounts and debit cards? That hardly seems realistic. There is also the option of gift cards, but that means the money can only be spent at certain places, taking away the vital learning curve of saving your money to put it toward a Big Goal. Forget lemonade stands, gifts from Grandpa, or putting change in a piggy bank – these will all be things of the past.
The unbanked or underbanked
Eight million households in the United States are “underbanked” or “unbanked.” This means that they don’t have any kind of bank account due to fees, bad credit, or other obstacles. These people rely on check-cashing businesses that already take a hefty fee to give them the pay they’ve earned. What will they do when this is no longer an option?
Most of the people who are unbanked or underbanked are living under the poverty line already. This would mean that they can no longer pick up side-gigs to make ends meet, they can’t do odd jobs, and getting them any kind of assistance will be more difficult.
Slate reports how the coin shortage is affecting these Americans:
To the average American, this shortage may only cause minor headaches—a harder time paying at a parking meter or exact change required at a coffee shop. But some 8 million American households, or 6 percent of Americans, are “unbanked,” meaning that because of fees and other financial hurdles, they have no checking, savings, or money market account. Many rely instead on services such as money orders, pawn shop loans, or payday loans. According to Venky Shankar, a marketing professor at the Center for Retailing Studies at Texas A&M University, Americans who make $25,000 a year or less use cash for around 45 percent of their purchases. So those Americans might struggle to pay for essential services without change on hand. They also might find it more stressful to round up or donate their change, should stores ask for it. “For an unbanked or underbanked person, it could leave them in a horrible situation if they don’t have access to the cards,” saidAngela Lyons, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (source)
And this is just a coin shortage. Imagine how difficult it would be if our society became completely cashless.
There is an alarming amount of power in access.
So, we can see this isn’t an ideal situation for any of us.
But even these things are relatively minor in comparison to the potential for abuse against citizens in a cashless society. If every single dime you bring in is tracked and recorded, you will have no financial privacy, and you’ll also be at far more risk. Many of us keep some cash savings around the house for emergencies. Even if there is a bank holiday, we’ll be okay because we have the money sitting around to take care of any incidentals while we are unable to access our banked money.
But what happens when things are cashless? All that money we’ve stashed away over the years would have to go into the coffers and we’d lose a certain amount of control.
It’s all well and good when times are okay, but what happens when there’s a Cyprus-style event and the government decides a bail-in is in order? If you don’t recall, back in 2013, billions of dollars were seized from depositors to protect the small country’s banking system. This was done to make good on an $11.6 billion dollar debt owed to creditors outside the country.
If you think that sounds far-fetched – like something that could “never happen here,” it’s incredibly important to note that we already have language that allows for bail-ins here in the United States. After the bailouts for the economic crisis of 2008, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Act of January 2010, which prohibits government bailouts but allows bail-ins. So, yes, the money in your account could indeed be used to save a floundering bank.
Not only that, but think about the outrageous phenomenon of civil asset forfeiture. If you aren’t familiar with it, that means that an entity can seize your property or money even when you have not been convicted of a crime. Civil asset forfeiture provides billions of dollars to the US Government and local police departments every single year. Imagine how much easier that would be if your wealth was all in one place.
And let me take it just one step further before I take off the tinfoil – think about how many websites, YouTube channels, and social media accounts have been purged and demonetized over the past few years. Is it that much of a stretch of the imagination that this could be taken a step further? That perhaps unpopular opinions could be fined and money immediately be withdrawn from the accounts of those who dissent with the status quo?
Maybe I’m just another paranoid conspiracy theorist. But are you actually paranoid when “they” are really out to control you?
What do you think?
Do you think we’re headed toward a cashless society? Are you concerned about this? Have you considered how you’d deal with this situation if it were to occur? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, gun-toting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. Daisy is the best-selling author of 4 books and lives in the mountains of Virginia with her two daughters and an ever-growing menagerie. You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter
Source: The Organic Prepper
Jobs where cash has to be paid like london cab drivers only book a small amount and a lot of money in fares is ” off the books ” many london cabbies are jewish and they deal a lot in the black economy. This will mean government or the banks behind the government
will be able to tax it all VAT is already 20% and huge tax rises are coming to pay for the huge covid scam
Greville janner who was head of the board of British deputies
said ” we the jews own your country and it will be bled financially until israel is the finest country in the world ”
Both Jonathan Pollard and Sheldon Adelson are on record as saying similar.
WE really need to take back the countries owner ship and ship the jews out on refugee boats over to Peslestine
This is why I keep saying in the end probably the only way to defeat their totalitarian prison grid, which needs electricity 24/7/365 for the digital technology that runs it, is regular rolling blackouts for a year or two. By that time the mass-murderers in charge will have killed off anybody who needs dialysis machines or other electrical devices to stay alive, after which they’ll have lists from amongst the rest of us who they want to kill next and in which order.
If they enjoy electrical power forever their death-machine will roll on unchallenged. So we need to put their microchip robo-gear out of action. They can run it all from New Zealand or wherever, and if we neuter their system they won’t dare come back to oversee its repair. I think once their system goes live it’ll be the only chance we’ve got.
The Satanic Criminal Bolshevik Ashkenazi Khazars of the Illuminati Federal Reserve want to force YOU into a digital currency. This will allow the Satanists to control every aspect of your life.
You have been warned.
I myself think, without doubt, The Power$ That Be (TP$TB) have designed, planned, simulated, and otherwise possess — on the shelf — “cashless” systems ready to implement as soon as THEY feel the RIGHT TIME has come. In all probability, focus-group-tested ideas for the transition(s) from cash OK to cash NOT OK, vetted and tested, have emerged from the abstract to final concretization. The “coin shortage” is not a “dry run”, rather a step, an increment, for this new dish involving yet another BOILING OF FROGS.
As Ben Franklin reputedly said or wrote: A penny saved is a penny earned. Now we might say that a penny saved is metal reserved for purposes not “money”. Those with large caches of “paper FRNs” [Federal Reserve Notes, debt instruments]: Keep tuned! You may wish to off-load your stashes of cash gradually before you have to “exchange” those pieces of paper for other pieces of (transitional) paper (e.g., SDR notes) — or digital entries in some account you can access IF you have a chip in your hand or forehead!
Local community currencies seem like one answer. Stuff the Government and their banks.
How about demanding a return to silver coinage – silver kills ALL bugs!! and we’ll get our value for money back, and there’s more https://defending-gibraltar.net/t/demand-a-return-to-silver-coinage-silver-kills-all-bugs/541
(Bypass any blocks with e.g. https://www.torproject.org/ browser)
[This link should work – the previous one didn’t.]
How about demanding a return to silver coinage – silver kills all bugs!! and more
https://defending-gibraltar.net/t/demand-a-return-to-silver-coinage-silver-kills-all-bugs/541
Cashless is bad for regular sheeple. There are so many issues that they can’t all be covered here.
The really big problem is that ‘they’ can literally shut you down & stop your access to digital money. They can force compliance on so many fronts with the penalty to block access to your digital cash… get your vaccination or else.
What I think is going to happen, is more availability in Bitcoin like money where regimes can’t get access, let alone know where you are spending it or who is paying you. At the moment, Bitcoin is used as a path to cash, at some point Bitcoin becomes cash. What will happen is that more & more sheeple will use digital money, but not digital dollars, pounds and euros.
It’s fine for sheeple in Scandinavian countries to cashless, they live in very wealthy societies where people earn good money (average pay in Norway is just under €50 per hour), where the majority feel inclusive, where crime is very low… so cashless works for most, but in crime-ridden countries, like the UK and US, the sheer volume of illegal activity will necessitate some form of payment (digital) that the regime can’t monitor or control. We already see members of the regime raise concerns about poor/disadvantaged sheeple struggling without cash… these regime actors don’t give a shit about the poor, their concern is for organised crime.
Remember, the UK regime uses estimated vice and narcotics revenues to boost UK GDP… France and Italy doesn’t use this cheat. This is why the UK is really 8/9th largest economy.
Think about social credit in China where you cannot use cash if your employer has made you a part of that system. If you have any opinion that is ‘not allowed’, your card is stopped for a week and you get a visit from the police. Next time it is stopped for a month and again you are not able to pay for anything. What happens after that?
Go back to sovereignty; each and every country develop or return to whatever currency they used to have, i/e the Punt for Ireland – etc. This is by far the best option also for the bottomless pit of debt that can never be paid back to the moneylenders in the Temple, and as money is a credit system, they get land and property for the trade; so ditch them all, back to the hell they come from, push back their indoctrinated education that has destroyed our young people’s minds, and reinstall God’s Earth as it was meant to be; not the hell of Lucifer and it’s dominions…………..Here’s to Freedom Love and Truth!!
Never saw sheep using cash ….
My old history teacher often said “A good king is a good thing, even a bad king is a good thing because he can control the money power”. As can anyone with absolute power. And if things go wrong you know who to blame.
The problem with democracy is that there is so much corruption, no one takes responsibility and when it is all said and done the media runs the agenda ……..and who owns that!
And that is why the kings had to go, falsely accused of something and then “legally” murdered.
All supermarkets are not in competition, they are one big cartel
look how they all acted in unision to force people to wear masks
they will all stop serving cetain folk at the same time
could you be one ?
a small independent supermarket near me was about to close, but the couple running it, said even tho they cant compete economivally they alow people to come in as they want without masks
business has been booming, the guy said this has saved us
WE MUST ALL JOIN THE ISRAELI BOYCOTT
A cashless society is NOT on its way. However, the Quantum Financial System began on 2nd August and is tied in with NESARA/GESARA which Trump and his “Q Alliance” have enacted from an act officially signed (under duress) by Bill Clinton in 2002. It will mean revaluing all World currencies and bringing them all to near parity, an end to the old Fiat/usury/debt system, and many other initiatives.
Thanks for posting this. The “cashless’ system will run into big snags because the payoffs that control politicians at all levels (a three trillion dollar a year business) will be much more overt, and without the opaqueness of cash “electronic payoffs” would kind of wreck the CIA’s drug running operations. Gosh, we can’t have that now. Check out Catherine Austin Fitts classic “Narco Dollars for Beginners”.
The big problem I see with Bitcoin is that sooner or later the (public access part of the) internet is going to be shut down. Where does all that electronic “money” go then?
Uncontrolled immigration is already pushing resources to the limit. What happens when the power grid goes down? The banks will no doubt have their own protected power supplies, but what about the rest of us?
Batteries? How do we charge them with no mains electricity? What good will our battery-powered devices (laptops, mobile ‘phones) be, even if we can find a way to charge them (solar perhaps?), if there is no more internet?
Barney: the Russians are building their own INDEPENDENT internet because they believe the US will block them. I suspect the Chinese are doing the same.