Swedes resisting the move to cashless society… we should, too

Sweden is one of a number of countries that are moving toward a cashless society. Stores there are abandoning or have abandoned their cash tills, and the country’s buses long ago stopped accepting currency from passengers.

But a growing number of Swedes are recognizing that in a cashless society, he who controls the servers control the country. And that’s making them uneasy.

From The Guardian:

In February, the head of Sweden’s central bank warned that Sweden could soon face a situation where all payments were controlled by private sector banks.

The Riksbank governor, Stefan Ingves, called for new legislation to secure public control over the payments system, arguing that being able to make and receive payments is a “collective good” like defence, the courts or public statistics.

“Most citizens would feel uncomfortable to surrender these social functions to private companies,” he said.

“It should be obvious that Sweden’s preparedness would be weakened if, in a serious crisis or war, we had not decided in advance how households and companies would pay for fuel, supplies and other necessities.”

The central bank governor’s remarks are helping to bring other concerns about a cash-free society into the mainstream, says Björn Eriksson, 72, a former national police commissioner and the leader of a group called the Cash Rebellion, or Kontantupproret.

Until now, Kontantupproret has been dismissed as the voice of the elderly and the technologically backward, Eriksson says.

“When you have a fully digital system you have no weapon to defend yourself if someone turns it off,” he says.

“If Putin invades Gotland [Sweden’s largest island] it will be enough for him to turn off the payments system. No other country would even think about taking these sorts of risks, they would demand some sort of analogue system.”

According to polls, almost 70 percent of the Swedish people oppose the move to cashless. Only 25 percent say they want a completely cashless society.

Banksters and government men are opposed to cash for several reasons: they can’t control or track its use; they can’t prevent people from pulling their money out of banks if negative interest rates (where people pay the bank to hold their cash) are introduced; and it prevents them from consolidating their power.

Cash money offers a certain privacy and freedom of movement and choice. The underground economy operates on cash and barter. This puts it out of reach of bureaucrats and non-producing government parasites who want to live off of your labor. That draws the ire of the state. It can’t abide those who attempt to operate outside the system.

Cash also creates a problem for the money printers and government men who are continually trying to find a way to prop up the system.

With low interest rates and the banking system on less than sound footing and revealing a disdain for its customers through announcements of potential “bail-ins,” a tax on deposits and currency transaction reports (CTRs) and suspicious activity reports (SARs), people are showing a tendency to hold their cash rather than put it into banks.

People holding their cash prevents the banksters from using that money as reserves to further increase the money supply. It also prevents the Federal Reserve from using negative interest rates to further prop up the system by printing even more money.

Banksters and propaganda media financial writers have pushing for the U.S. to go cashless for several years. The CEO of Deutsche Bank calls cash “terribly inefficient and expensive.” A Bloomberg  article called cash and coins “dirty and dangerous, unwieldy and expensive, antiquated and so very analog,” implying anyone opposing it is a Luddite.

Harvard economics professor Kenneth Rogoff wrote for Financial Times that the time has come to get rid of physical currency and replace it with electronic money. Additionally, Rogoff writes, “[P]hasing out currency would address the concern that a significant fraction, particularly of large-denomination notes, appears to be used to facilitate tax evasion and illegal activity.”

Last year, VISA offered up to 50 small businesses a reward of $10,000 if they will change to cashless.

Cash is essential to liberty. We recommend everyone keep most of their money out of banks, maintaining an account with only enough in it to cover a month’s worth of bills. The rest should be in cash and hard assets like gold and silver.

The post Swedes resisting the move to cashless society… we should, too appeared first on Personal Liberty®.