"Cashless societies" in the framework of the United States (and capitalist societies that are inundated with private banking) are just a vessel for big banks to thrive and have a stronger control of your finances in multiple ways.

An example of which: remember when Visa and Mastercard blocked any donations to Wikileaks, because the site had burgeoning amounts of evidence against them in terms of fraudulence? Now imagine that in a much bigger scale against political entities.

When they are near bankruptcy because they made bad loans so they can get short term bonuses, but those loans eventually turn bad, they can just inherently vacuum 10% of everyone's money out of their account to do a bail-in. They cannot do this with physical currency.

Next, we're hopeless in the case of any major cyber-attack or outage. American infrastructure, in general, is horrible, and companies do not take security as well as they want you to think they do.

Vouchers that certify you contributed a certain amount of labor to society. Cannot circulate like money does, once you use it, your voucher is gone, and if you want more, you have to contribute labor to society again, i.e. earn a wage.

You can't make "money out of money" anymore, which is passive income = leaching from the real economy , i.e. rent. Instead everybody has to do their fair share instead of leaching from workers like landlords do, everybody has to produce real value and not just fake financial value that only exists on paper.

hmmmmm that is not the worst thing i have ever heard

although i do enjoy my financial situation getting better and better even though it is imaginary. it's easy if one is organized with it

crazy how much money there is in money

People like Marx have advocated for this, it is a classic socialist idea.

But: The major problem in socialist societies of the past was the technological aspect. They didn't have electronic debit cards like we did, so how were you going to "destroy the vouchers" so they don't circulate? Today, it would just be taken from your bank account electronically, but back then, you would have to rip a piece of paper or whatever, which would be very unpractical and unsafe.

Furthermore, the biggest question is how do you measure and calculate labor, its value or the amount of labor that goes into a product on average? This is something too complex to explain in a KTT post, but many smart people have written books and papers on this, so practical solutions do exist. It used to be a problem in the past century, which is why Austrian economists like Hayek said "socialism has a calculation problem", but I think with the advent of modern computers, this is no longer a real issue.

This system is of course not possible under capitalism. The big elites of capitalism earn "their money from money" - they earn it from being able to siphon a few percent from whatever value their employees create, like from stock dividends, or from renting out real estate and other financial instruments. The USA is for example not the world's best or biggest manufacturer - their superpower status comes from being the premier finance market and having the world's reserve currency.

Labor vouchers would be the only practical solution when abolishing money. It has the advantages of money without the disadvantages for the common worker. But it is of course highly disadvantageous for the wealthiest people, who do not own most of their wealth in cash but through other means.

As a yungin i always went to coffeeshops paying in cash with a fake id cant do that with a debit card ya kno!

Plus my mom woulda been mad as s***tt

It gives the government control of your finances by basically monitoring what you are spending.

At least with cash, you can buy things without the government/bank knowing that you bought something that day.

No physical

Then you’re putting a ton of trust in your government and I’m not comfortable doing so

Would mean the government would be able to track all money transfers if they wanted which eliminates a black market (which is healthy). Causing a monopoly of sorts and just way too much faith in governments to not f*** it up

A cashless society is the equivalent of giving the government, your creditors, debt collectors, and law enforcement a permanent record of every purchase you've ever made, establishments that you frequent, and spending habits. It forces you to be permanently entwined with a bank, from which they can exert total control over your finances -- imagine the government freezing your bank account and denying you all access to your capital because you posted something cheeky about Trump on KTT.

It is also extremely inefficient, especially if there happens to be a local or national power shortage for whatever reason; in many poor countries, power outages are a daily occurrence. It also guarantees that there is zero physical value equivalent for the numbers on the screen, meaning it has all of the value and scarcity of Runescape gold.

basically everything went to s*** when the US dollar became a fiat currency in the 70s & it’ll only get worse from here

How would that voucher carry over to international level where it essentially is irrelevant to other countries? A country itself also sustains, promotes the growth of their economy not just from domestic sectors but with trades, imports and exports etc

Let me quote how foreign trade would work. It's basically treated like money in foreign countries but not at home. There would be no monetary policy like the Federal Reserve in the USA, it would be all up to foreign capitalist markets what the exchange rate is.

"Imports from the capitalist world are paid for in labour credits; labour credits may be exported and can circulate abroad but not at home. We wish to prevent the formation of money capital as a social relation within the domestic economy, which is why labour credits are not allowed to circulate domestically. In the capitalist world money capital already exists so there is no objection to labour credits of the socialist nation circulating between foreign capitalists. A capitalist firm that supplies the nation with imports will be given an account with the ministry of foreign trade and credited with a certain number of hours of labour.

The firm may then obtain a transferable certificate of credit from the trade ministry. These certificates of labour credit would then serve as non-interest bearing negotiable instruments which the holders could sell on the financial markets for whatever currency they wished. The demand for such instruments would come
from companies who want to buy the socialist nation's exports. It is unnecessary for the nation's trade ministry to establish an exchange rate, that is a private matter for the capitalist financial markets. Since both exports and imports are evaluated (and international transactions settled) in labour vouchers, the Dollar or Yen price of these on the world market can be ignored when deciding what to export or import. All that matters to the socialist economy is the product of the foreign currency price of goods and the exchange rate."

Are people scared of banks again?

• Semi Valid Paranoia: Yo you don't want your weed to get moldy do you? Let me hold on to it, I'll give you back an equal amount of weed in return when ever you want, trust. What, you don't want to let me hold on to it? Well it's a danger to the general public to allow individuals to store their own weed, so either hand it over or we confistact it, not to mention the fines and potential jail time. Banks don't keep a quarter of the money they hold, google "bank run".

• Completely Valid Concern: This is not an inherent issue with banks, but a majority of the first world's federal reserve gave banks the power to create money some time between the 20s and the 90s. This means that private banks control the value of money, are able to crash the economy with selfish decisions and profit a significant margin off of (nearly) all money that enters circulation via interest.

Would the govt need a real national bank so everyone can get a card?

• Money is generated/enters circulation via loans. Inflation/value of currency is controlled by assuring loans aren't handed out to people who cannot pay them back. When private corporations are in charge of deciding who gets loans, they make decisions based on personal profit and not the health of the general economy nor the racial/sexual equality of their loan approvals. When public democratic organizations are in charge of this, there's a higher chance of the process being more beneficial to the general public.

Would it save trees because of paper? Same with metal?

• Paper production is paradoxically a massive carbon sink when harvested from sustainable forests. Seems we're switching to plastics though. The pollution element is definitely an argument for a cashless society, but then again bitcoin and the other million cryptos, as well as venmo and other alternatives work just fine to send money to and from people in a decentralized network whilst still allowing you to keep your savings physical.

People already get food stamp cards so what would be a difference?

• Wot. The government (HOPEFULLY) would never print itself money for social programs like that, that's not how the economy works. They would give people loans and use the profits from interest to go towards improving social programs, maybe even doing UBI.

IMO if I where king, you can still have private banks and private loans, they just aren't allowed to generate money out of thin air. Want to loan greg 100K for a coffee shop business? You better have 100K in the bank, then actually transfer that 100K to him. None of this "well we have 1B in the bank, so we can just give (nearly) infinite million dollar loans out of thin air while sitting on this cash and collecting the interest profits, right?" bullshit.

Most money in America is generated via Mortgages, if the government simply offered competitive rate mortgages they'd make bank and be able to offer people lower housing costs. Even if these were only mortgages for primary residences under a certain value. This way all loans other than primary residential mortgage loans would still be private, they just should wouldn't be generating free money.

The traceable point is the biggest reason for me