Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Making Money Obsolete

The truth is that a cashless society is much closer than most people would ever dare to imagine. To a large degree, the transition to a cashless society is being done voluntarily. Today, only 7 percent of all transactions in the United States are done with cash, and most of those transactions involve very small amounts of money. Just think about it for a moment. Where do you still use cash these days? If you buy a burger or if you purchase something at a flea market you will still use cash, but for any mid-size or large transaction the vast majority of people out there will use another form of payment. Our financial system is dramatically changing, and cash is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. We live in a digital world, and national governments and big banks are both encouraging the move away from paper currency and coins. But what would a cashless society mean for our future? Are there any dangers to such a system?

In a libertarian/free trade society money is a medium of exchange freely agreed upon by the participants in the trade, it is not a government-imposed arbitrary abstraction. This article tells us about how government and the financial industry are quickly making the use of any form of physical money anti-social and actually illegal.

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