01/14/2017 - Post can be found on DollarVigilante.com
From Scandinavia to Amsterdam to India and elsewhere, the trend of going "cashless" is gaining traction.
We have been covering the shortcomings of what is rightly called the War On Cash here at TDV for a while now and have shown just how negative the effects can be on an unsuspecting nation's people.
Chandigarh, India, which is the capital of the northern Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, is like one of India's labrats. Indian officials are working hard toward making it into India's first cashless city.
This initiative is part of the Prime Minister of India's call for state governments to begin developing what he's calling "smart" cities.
That means cities attached to the latest internet technology. However there is nothing intelligent about his plan.
One of the major changes being made to work toward that objective was the insistence of having all bills paid electronically at government offices within the city.
Similarly, in Panjim, the capital of Goa, India, the local government is attempting to incentivize the locals into paying digitally by offering them discounts on train tickets and other public transportation services if they pay electronically.
This is an extension of the ongoing cash battle which has been going on in India since November when Modi announced he was going to replace the 500 and 1000 rupee banknotes. However the government has not started replacements, only ensured the removal.
What followed the eradication of India's largest denomination notes was a constricted Indian economy, particularly among the middle and lower classes who rely predominantly on cash transactions to conduct daily business.
There are a myriad of problems associated with this. Many street vendors, rickshaw drivers, and other small time merchants cannot afford the card readers necessary to conduct the transactions electronically.
In some cases the consequences have been starvation, suicide, and the inability to pay for medical expenses because of lack of access to funds or because of how difficult it is to exchange the 500 and 1000 rupee notes for lower denomination bills.
Also in Europe, in places like London, many stores and restaurants have stopped accepting notes or coins for payment and only allow their customers to pay with plastic.
It's becoming common for Londoners to treat people using cash as second class citizens. In other words, it is becoming unfashionable to pay with cash according to the status quo.
The same is true for the people of Sweden, particularly in the cities of Stockholm and Gothenburg. Which is ironic considering that in 1661, the Scandinavian monarchy became the first country in the world to issue paper currency.
In Sweden this had forced people into storing their cash in bank accounts that come with negative interest rates - yes, the banks are charging them to save their money rather than rewarding them with positive yielding interest.
In Amsterdam, the homeless, many of whom survive by selling magazines, are increasingly hard pressed to find people willing to pay in cash as well. The problem is that even if the homeless had cheap cell phones with QR readers - which Amsterdam has talked about helping the homeless community to obtain - they still don't have the bank accounts necessary to receive the payments.
Then there is Uruguay which doesn't get much attention, but this small South American country was among the very first to announce it was getting rid of at least some cash transactions. Unlike some other counties, Uruguay's cash reduction was couched in terms of helping the poor.
Soon the country plans to implement bank accounts for all payroll payments. It is supposedly doing this in order to make sure even the very poorest have bank accounts. In fact, this is not going to do much to help very poor people because they don't have jobs to begin with. But it sounds good on paper.
All in all, the elimination of cash is being done under the guise of helping to combat terrorism, white collar crime, tax evasion, and criminals from hiding behind untraceable cash transactions.
Of course, the reality is that without cash, governments and banks gain the ability to run economies like totalitarian police states - tracking every transaction and parasitically siphoning wealth via income tax and other forms of taxation.
This is all part of a UN backed, globalist movement towards "smart cities" where people will own nothing and live in small boxes and everything will be transacted digitally via the government.
You can see what they have planned for "smart cities" here:
Basically, if you see the word "smart" in front of something, it means "slave".
This is precisely why it is increasingly important to keep your assets outside of these jurisdictions and out of the financial system in general in safer alternatives such as precious metals and cryptocurrencies.
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Anarcho-Capitalist. Libertarian. Freedom fighter against mankind's two biggest enemies, the State and the Central Banks. Jeff Berwick is the founder of The Dollar Vigilante, CEO of TDV Media & Services and host of the popular video podcast, Anarchast. Jeff is a prominent speaker at many of the world's freedom, investment and gold conferences including his own, Anarchapulco, as well as regularly in the media including CNBC, CNN and Fox Business.