Why We’re Headed Toward A “Cashless Society”

• Why We’re Headed Toward A “Cashless Society”
  by BILL BONNER, http://bonnerandpartners.com/  
  … Controls on Cash
  A reader asks a good question:
  I have a question about the recommendation to hold cash. If countries are putting controls on real cash and banking, in what form should a person hold cash? U.S. dollars or some other currency. If we truly go to a “cashless society” what good would having a hoard of cash do?
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  We would like to have a better answer, but we only have the one we have. Money is always a convention. It is an understanding. People recognize money as a stand-in for wealth. Since the beginning of civilization, people have experimented with different kinds of money. They ended up – almost always and almost everywhere – with gold and silver. Why?
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  Because they were handy. And because they were hard to produce. They were cash that governments could not easily control. No super-humans were needed to manage them.
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  Governments – the people who are able to boss other people around – always want to control money. They put their faces on it. They mint it. They clip coins. And they print pieces of paper and call it money. But they could never completely control cash. People hoarded gold. They hid it. They ran away with it. They used it to make trades between themselves… regardless of what the feds said. And when the feds’ money went kaput – which it always did – they turned back to gold, because they knew they could trust it.
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  And now, the feds are making a new attempt to bring money totally under their control. For example, under the pretext of cutting funding for terrorists, the French government already has a law in the pipeline banning cash transactions of over €1,000 ($1,120). There’s nothing stopping governments from banning cash transactions altogether… and ending the usage of paper money.
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  Economists pretend it is a matter of convenience to the consumer (no more waiting for the clerk to make change for the fellow in front of you). …or they try to sell it as a useful macro tool for central planners (they will be able to stimulate demand by imposing negative interest rates)… 
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  …or they say a cashless world will be safer – you won’t be held up at gunpoint, and terrorists will find it harder to get financing. 
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  But the real reason is control. If governments can eliminate cash, they can easily track, tax, and confiscate your money.
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  read more.

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