The bad feeling I get from cashless is "what if some future political conflict will lower the status of my ethnicity to such a low position, so I'll be denied buying food and nobody will care?" or some similar scenario.
> The bad feeling I get from cashless is "what if some future political conflict will lower the status of my ethnicity to such a low position, so I'll be denied buying food and nobody will care?" or some similar scenario.
I don't mean to be obtuse, but how would cash solve this? If someone is bigoted against you and won't take cash from you, or marks up the price or engages in some other less obvious manipulation, and you're not in a position to rely on law enforcement, then what can you do about it?
For credit cards, my access can be disabled when the two networks are coerced into blacklisting me. For cash, the imaginary evil powers would have to convince tens of thousands of individual stores to do the same. And even then, it would be impossible to enforce, because with a cash payment, there is no record that could be checked to enforce compliance.
> For cash, the imaginary evil powers would have to convince tens of thousands of individual stores to do the same.
You seem to be implying that this is somewhat unlikely.
History is full of this exact thing happening.
Recent history.
Until the 1970s in the US it was legal, and common, for businesses to refuse to do business with a woman without a male's permission. There were only a precious few municipalities where this was not the norm.
Grocery stores until the mid-1900s did not actually sell products to women. Women would pick out and receive products and a bill would be sent to her male supervisor for his approval and payment. Even in large cities, this wasn't limited to the stereotypical geographic regions that seem to thrive on oppressing minorities (although the large coastal cities were the first to do away with it), it was very often illegal for a woman to live alone so single women would live in boarding houses with chaperones and curfews.
There seems to be a great cultural amnesia about all of this happening-- despite there being millions of people who are still alive to which it happened.
My mother joined the Women's Army Air Force in the early 1970s because she could not rent, open a bank account, use store credit, or obtain automobile insurance without her father's permission-- which he would have given but she being who she was (and still is) wouldn't ask for in a million years. Servicemember-associated organizations had no such compunction.
There is no functional difference in "opressivenessabilityivity" between cash and cards.
There is no nameless, faceless, "them" waiting to oppress you, oppression is a function of broader civil society.
> Grocery stores until the mid-1900s did not actually sell products to women. Women would pick out and receive products and a bill would be sent to her male supervisor for his approval and payment.
I find this hard to believe, how would that work in large and anonymous cities where nobody knows each other? If a woman went grocery shopping they would send the bill to where exactly, just a random address she gives them? What if she gives them fake address?
I doubt that shops would refuse for example a widow if she had money from military or inheritence, also men were often away and the women did not just starve to death.
Because it's not true. Maybe mid-1800s, but by mid-1900s women could totally use cash. Not credit cards though, 1974 is when women were allowed to get those. In other words, the exact opposite of what that comment is saying.
Up until the invention of the self-service supermarket you could not walk into a grocery store, pick out a can of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, flip a dime to a cashier, and walk out with it.
The self-service grocery store did not exist until WWI.
They did not become common until some time around WWII.
They did not go extinct until the 70s.
My grandmothers could not (and did not) use cash to buy groceries because there were no cash-and-carrys near them. They needed an account, until the 60s-70s in rural Tennessee and Missouri where they lived.
Everything was paid by check. Drop off the order, pick up the order, bring home the bill, the husband sends in a check.
There was an exact and precise 0.0% chance in many parts of the United States of America of a single unwed woman getting an account at a grocery store without a male cosigner.
So the alternative is, what, you can spend whatever is left in your wallet, but the rest of your money is still frozen? The difference from maintaing physical cash seems very marginal. Or are you suggesting we all pull all our money out of bank accounts and store it in cash under the bed, just in case one day we get unpersoned? The costs of doing that vastly outweight the expected benefits.
This is a strawman argument: You've setup a scenario where cash isn't very beneficial, and then show why it's not beneficial.
Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, women could only use cash. Sure it would have been way cooler if they weren't discriminated against, but many women still only survived because of the cash option, and none of them would have said "Well since I might run out of money anyway go ahead and make it impossible for me to use what I have".
It's not a straw man, it's literally the scenario the guy I was replying to was talking about ("if your accounts are frozen"). If you had a bank account like a normal person, and then you are surprised by your account being frozen, you are going to be almost as screwed whether physical cash exists or not, because you won't be keeping that much cash on hand anyway.
Cash was the normal way to pay for things before the ECOA so I don't think it's comparable to today, where nobody uses cash anymore. You used to be able to be paid in cash, or in a cheque you could cash at the grocery store. Now you probably need to have your pay deposited into a bank account, which you may only be able to access electronically, so if your account is frozen you are far more screwed.
The risk is at the point of entry of your money, not the point of exit.
Find me an employer who will happily pay you cash directly in 2024. Find me a way to get your finances in order without a bank that then has to respect laws surrounding transactions.
The fact we can't obfuscate cash purchases does not reduce the ability of your government to deny you access to your money in a bank.
"They take away your freedom in one area X, and when they want to take away your freedom in another area Y you go, it's ok, we have bigger problems like X".
