Cashless is great! So convenient. Who wants to carry around all that messy, dirty money, when you can just zap it with your card or phone?

See, the cool thing is that when you pay with cashless all the transactions have to go through a bank, so you, the bank, and the government, have an exact record of where, when, and what you bought. Nobody can cheat on taxes anymore! Nobody can buy anything the government has decreed is illegal!

What’s even better is that a cashless society would eliminate all those unsightly beggars from the streets. The thing is, the wise and benevolent government has made it impossible to open a bank account without positive proof of address, so homeless people and transients can’t have one. Of course they shouldn’t have one – homeless people and travelling people with no fixed residence aren’t human beings, right? In a cashless society they will simply starve to death, being unable to pay for food, and good riddance!

But I’ve saved the best for last. This is brilliant! In a cashless society, the authorities will exercise absolute control over everyone’s purchasing power. This means that if they suspect anyone of any kind of wrongdoing, they can at the touch of a button, cut that person off completely from any kind of purchases, and thereby coerce them into compliance. The suspected criminal will have no recourse. So much simpler and cheaper than sending police to arrest them and going through complicated and expensive legal proceedings where the government would actually have to prove the person committed a misdeed.

Don’t we all want the government to have that kind of power? Of course this could never happen to you, an upright law-abiding citizen, or any of your friends or family – only to those filthy skulking no-goods who thumb their noses at the law. I mean, the laws are so simple these days that it’s easy to know if you are following them, or not, right?

It’s certainly best if the government has access to a complete and detailed record of every single purchase you make from when you are old enough to pay for things yourself until the day you die. They might find that the pattern of a person’s purchases fit a profile of someone who might commit an act of terrorism and so cut them off as a pre-emptive measure. And then the rest of us would all have more security.

You vote with your purchases. Whenever you buy anything from a business, you are voting in favor of that business. Similarly, when you pay by cashless you vote in favor of banks mediating every human transaction. When cash is gone, no one will have the power to deal directly financially with other people. So banks, for the directors of which we don’t vote (unless we own shares in them) will exercise absolute financial power. And we all know that rich and powerful people are wise and have your best interests in mind, right? Otherwise how did they get to be so rich and powerful?

Vote for more power to the banks and tighter control by the government. Pay only with cashless.