The Moose suggests that the smoker's attempts to terrify the population with 'smoker's money' might help bring about the change to electronic money. That will happen anyway. Cheques are already being phased out and more and more I see people paying for small purchases with a credit card. People are getting used to living cashless. Pay with the card, pay the card online, why I'll bet there are people out there now who haven't handled cash in months.
He's right. It will happen.
As that short except above suggests, many people are already doing away with cash and turning to electronic means, much to the annoyance of some.
They're becoming used to it. It's normal to them. Eventually they will look at folk like us who still use cash with a quaint sympathy. Like some will do now to those who still own a black and white television (no good for the snooker). That's the time when the government and pressure groups will tell them that cash is only used by money launderers, tax evaders and of course, paedophiles.
That quaint look in their eye will soon turn to mistrust and that's when the users of cash will become the same kind of public enemy as smokers or fat people.
The masses will then demand that cash is withdrawn and only electronic means are available.
The government does not need to pass unpopular draconian legislation to remove cash. They do not need to beat us and harass us. They just have to wait until the population demand it then 'relucantly' take action.
Why? What do the government have to gain from the removal of cash as a means of payment?
Total tax compliance is the biggy. If all transactions are done by electronic means, every one can be tracked. Every penny can be tracked through it's entire life. You will no longer be able to take cash for a job or favour done and keep it all to yourself. The government will take their cut every time. You will not be able to hide one penny of your money from them.
Do you know why the government keeps withdrawing one type of note from circulation and replacing it with another design?
Did you say, "To prevent counterfeiting",?
You would be wrong. They do it to prevent us amassing a large amount of cash that they are not aware of.
If you have £10,000 in the bank, the government, and more importantly HMRC know all about it. There is no banking privacy left in England. Large or 'suspicious transactions are reported to HMRC by British banks under threat of fines or imprisonment. This has the banks falling over themselves to report transactions on the off chance they may miss something and be held accountable for it. If HMRC wants to know about your banking activity they are told. No questions.
Now what if you had £10,000 is used notes under the bed? It may be totally legit, you may have paid all tax due on it but if it's not in the bank the government don't know about it and they hate that.
That's why they keep changing the currency using the guise of preventing fraud. If they change the design of the twenty pound notes in your underbed stash it makes them completely worthless. Unless of course, you take it to a bank and get it changed, at which point you will be asked all kinds of questions about where it came from.
If your answers are not believed, HMRC can tax your money without having to prove *pdf that any tax is due. They simply perform a 'Lifestyle Audit' and if they believe your income exceeds your tax payments, they will take what they believe is owed.
Cash is the last remaining 'bearer bond'. You do away with cash and the government has access to every transaction you make.
Your movements can also be tracked through your electronic purchases. Every time you use a cash card, the transaction amount, what you have purchased and where you made the purchase is logged on a computer.
The killing of Jo Yeates prompted a call by Labour MP Kerry McCarthy for every male living in Bristol to be DNA tested. This was never done due to the huge logistical nightmare it would have caused, but there will come a time when it is easy enough and cheap enough to complete such a task and it will become commonplace. If your electronic purchase details put in in an area where a serious crime has been committed, you may also become liable to blanket DNA testing.
If you fill up at petrol station one on the M6 at 12 noon then fill up again at petrol station two on the M6 at 16:00, your average speed will have been 76 mph. Your ticket is in the post.
If you regularly purchase a copy of Miss Whiplash, you be be noted as having a violent sexual fetish. Even worse if you pick up a copy of Teen Cherries. Peado incident in the neighbourhood? Expect a knock on the door.
Every transaction you ever make will be logged and noted. The Government can use it for tax purposes, the police can use it for lazy policing, marketing companies will buy the information to target you with even more advertising, even your spouse, with a good private dick and a bit of money will be able to check up on your whereabouts and find out about your "In the event of divorce" fund that you have hidden from her.
Your privacy will be totally gone. Without money you will not be able to function in society. When all your financial transactions are electronic your every move will be logged and recorded.
Without money you will not be able to function in society? Suspected of a crime? The police will not have to come looking for you, they will just be able to cancel your card. You will then have to report to the nearest police station for interrogation before your card can be re-activated.
Another valid point Leg-Iron makes in the post I linked to above, in fact the very title of his post is "Chips". The Government will 'want' to make things as easy as possible for us. They may remove cash which is cumbersome and easily stolen and replace it with a more secure electronic system that means you only have to carry one small card.
The identity card brought in by Labour and subsequently scrapped (for now) by the ConDems would have been the perfect tool for this.
Mooted at first as voluntary it would have soon become so necessary that you could not function in society without one.
Want a bank account? You need an ID card
Want a driving licence? You need an ID card
You can see where I am going with this and it would all be in the name of preventing crime and terrorism, the holy grail of a terminally frightened society.
Eventually your ID card would be used for your electronic money transations. This would be done in the guise of making things easy for you. Only one card to carry etc.
Of course your card can still be stolen or forged, so they will want to take the next logical step in financial transaction ease.
That next step is the tiny chip implanted under the skin. It cant be stolen, it cant be forged.
The sub dermal implant should be the stuff of science fiction but unfortunately it isn't. Far from it, the implant is already in use today.
This is the ultimate track and trace device that is slowly being brought in by steath. Remember, the government 'don't want to do it' but the people will demand it. Only after a long process of indoctrination by the government and vested interest groups.
Complain about it? Stand up for your rights as an individual, not the property of the state? What do you have to hide?
In the end, none of us will be able to hide anything.
10 Comments:
There is hope: the ‘black’ economy does not require cash. Brian next door and Dave down the road were and probably still are part of a group who shared their time and skills to create wealth. More formally there are bills of exchange – notes backed by the honour of the issuer and independent of any bank or government, though formally governed by the Bills of Exchange Act. If they become prohibited by law, there are IOU’s, also backed by the honour of the issuer without recourse to the courts and which may become far better than any government ordained instrument. Or ‘obs’, as invented by Eric Frank Russell in ‘And Then There Were None’ in 1951: http://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.php.
There are gold and silver. Perhaps a new gold standard will be established.
Of course government will pass laws making mere possession of gold and silver criminal offences (you’ll need a special licence for your teeth until they decide to extract them, with or without anaesthetic or death), but they and other precious metals will circulate along with tins of Spam, cigarettes (‘snout’ in prison slang, at least in Ronnie Barker’s ‘Porridge’ and likely to be for the prison that England seems destined to become), cans of Coke, or bottles of gin (a currency in West Africa during the slave trade).
‘My word is my bond’ is another currency: the motto of the London Stock Exchange, it applies to anyone of honour. You can perform a service for me, or supply goods and I can say ‘I will repay’. No immediate exchange, none required. The undertaking is entirely verbal (except it wasn’t on the LSE – it was based on mutual but independent record keeping by brokers and jobbers; there was a procedure for dealing with discrepancies).
The Italians are past masters of the art of the ‘black market’ otherwise known as the real economy in any free country, which we seem no longer to be, especially since our government is no longer based in Westminster.
DP
You make some excellent comments, most of which go beyond the point in my post. Maybe worthy of a separate post?
I was talking about mainly the reaction of the sheep and how it will affect us who are not sheep.
You talk about how those of us who are not sheep can get beyond the government restrictions.
You talk about Brian and Dave. Well one of my skills is fixing cars. If I was Brian I might fix Daves car if he was able to fix my roof, for example. The government could do nothing about that as no money has exchanged hands.
As for gold, silver and Gin, any medium of exchange is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.
In a truly cashless society, most people, and I'm probably talking 99% of them would be behind any government initiative. To trade in the barter system we would need to form small, indescreet collectives containing people like you and I.
Trade for skills and services would be easy but trade for things like the basics, food and water would become more difficult.
I could buy a pound of meat off you on the understanding that I would fix you car if it breaks down in the future, but I would need to be trading with a lot of people in order to have enough cars to fix to pay my way.
The black market may work in times of national emergency (something that I've prepared for) But in normal peacetime where the sheep are behind the government because they have been conditioned to be so, it might be a lot harder.
Your 'bills of exchange' might work if you trusted the person you were exchanging with as they have no recourse to the courts.
I would imagine anyone exchanging in such a contract would have to be worthy or else they would soon find themselves without trading partners.
On a harsher note, I've read that after a nuclear war, the most valuable comodity will be a car with an old diesel engine. They dont require electicrics (after the start up) and you can run them on veg oil
They say we're only five meals away from anarchy. I'd rather not find out if that's true!
The government will make it as difficult as possible to opt out and the sheep will continually be baying for 'loopholes' to be closed so it won't be easy.
I don't beleive the sheep will opt of of electronic money due to tax levels, I firmly beleive they will just keep paying up,
The sheep always pick the easy option. The easy option in this scenario is to pay all their tax and demand that all others are made to do so too.
The next vulnerability brings the next restriction, leading right up to implanted chips and probably beyond.
Microdave - Yes, as there will always be ways around the system for us, there will be ways around our systems for them.
To a point, yes, but only to a point. In real life the boiling frog analogy tends to stop eventually. We see it with taxation all the time and the Laffer curve would not, could not, exist otherwise.
Lifestyle audits, yes, HMRC could do that, but first they'd have to improve themselves to the point that they could find their own bollocks without having somebody kick them savagely in the crotch. My tax code was wrong for each of the last five years I was employed and between then and leaving the country the only reason I paid the right tax was because I was doing fucking self assessment. And having left the country what happened then? I got tax returns for three fucking years despite having sent them a letter saying that I'd rather be set on fire than return to the UK, and despite them mailing the fucking return to Australia. They spunk away vast sums of money on a slogan and have lost the private data of millions of taxpayers on more than once occasion.
Smart people will always find ways around them. The real danger is that the incompetent clowns will do a lifestyle audit on someone who's actually paid what he's owed and mistakenly form the belief that he's cheating. Besides, I fully expect the lazy cunts to go after the low hanging fruit as per usual and spend more time rifling through the boots and glove boxes of UK registered cars coming back through Dover looking for grog and cigs.
I wouldn't be too complacent AE, yes HMRC are incompetent but that only makes it worse, maybe some smart people can dodge this but a lot of people will be sucked into the maelstrom, and since they are judge, jury and executioner where tax matters are concerned once you're in getting out again isn't easy.
If they get a wiff that you are not declaring all your income, a lifestlye audit is one way that they figure out what they think you owe.
You are also bound by the results of the audit unless you can prove otherwise.
They may be a bag of bollocks operationally, but as Timdog points out, that really doesn't matter given the power they wield.
Smart people will always find ways around them, HMRC will close loopholes and smart people will open new ones ad infinitum.
The problem is that avoiding excessive taxation or monitoring by the government will become immensely difficult if you remove cash from society.
Timdog - Yes, after a period of time the old notes cease to be legal tender. They give you enough time to change your money or spend it, but if you've been hiding it the game's up.
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