Tax everything!

In the old days there used to be bank robbers… old Westerns were full of the stories. Now, the banks rob you.

It’s all part of a grand scheme to turn the entire world into indentured servants under total control.

Here is where the world is headed: Countries like India are already building corporately sponsored cities, municipal environments where people live in the same place they work.

How lovely is that? Your workplace provides your social activities, sponsors your apartment and transportation and generally surrounds you like a kind of corporate amniotic fluid.

Until you lose your job anyway. Then everything is turned off, your wife divorces you and, bereft of marriage, home and job, you will likely leave the place where you intended to grow old. Maybe you will die of exposure or an untreated disease – as no doubt you will have lost your medical care as well.

This is the future that our corporate masters have planned for us and as part of the total control they intend to migrate from paper money to the “cashless” society.

THE BRAVE NEW DIGITAL WORLD

Already we are subjected to a barrage of articles in major media about the upcoming brave, new digital world. India and the developing world in general is well-down this path as the developing world is always subject to these schemes before they are rolled out in the West.

In Africa and Kenya especially, people pay many bills via digital phone. In the West, Scandinavian countries have often proven the point of entry for utopian schemes and so it is in this case. In Sweden and Denmark especially events are racing ahead. Denmark plans to be cashless by 2030. And its citizens, according to reports, are said to be ecstatic.

Sweden is another funny, little country that has big plans from a cashless perspective. Many bank branches won’t even accept cash and like phone booths many ATM machines have been carted away.

We are told cash is only two percent of the Swedish economy currently. In Denmark, only 25% of citizens use much cash, down from 80% twenty years ago.

But it’s not just Sweden and Denmark. Brussels itself is relentlessly pressuring citizens not to use cash. In Spain, you can’t make cash purchases over 2,500 euros. In France and Italy that figure is down to 1,000.

This is great for banks of course. Think of all the fees they can charge. Governments like it because cashless societies are transparent societies. If you pay everything digitally your entire life is mapped out, purchase by purchase and paycheck by paycheck. That’s a great boon to tax collectors.

And there is another reason as well. Keynesian style economies don’t work very well. Keynesian central banks eventually get into trouble because they constantly have to stimulate – print large amounts of money – to make up for the essential failure of Keynesian economics to create viable societies.

We are well into the maturity of Keynesian economics and central banks more and more must consider challenging the zero-bound. ie: charging negative interest rates that will demand that you the customer must pay the bank for the privilege of storing your non-existent “money” there.

This plan has many benefits – for the bank – and few if any for you. Naturally, you might wish to store your wealth in cash because at least you wouldn’t be paying interest on your savings.

And that means that cash is the opponent of a negative interest rate society. If banks and policy makers want the ability to move up and down the interest rate scale easily and quickly, they must ban the chief opponent of such a scheme – coins and notes.

Yes, folks, that’s at least partially what’s driving this move to the cashless society. It’s the best of all scenarios for government officials and bankers. Your entire life is exposed, blip by blip. No more fudging on taxes… or late payment. The US has even just passed into law that if you owe taxes your passport will be rescinded… you won’t be able to get out at that point.

That’s the dream anyway, In reality, like so many other government schemes, it won’t quite work out as planned. It is not possible to legislate away competition. One can try of course, but if people see they have no option but to deposit funds in banks that will penalize them every month, those same savers will find alternative methods of saving as little as possible, at least formally… which will only worsen the economy and hasten the coming Greater Depression.

In other words, while government will impose its cashless schemes by force, people will do what they have always done, create gray and black markets (a.k.a. free markets) that provide the choice governments deprives them of.

It is like the EU itself. Today many in Europe have “buyers regret” and in places like Sweden, the current crop of politicians may rejoice over a non-cash utopian future but that may soon change radically.

In Sweden as in Germany, France and many other countries, a political backlash is brewing, characterized by “right wing” anti-immigration parties. And while immigration is currently the big issue the likelihood is that this political movement will set itself in opposition to many other EU-oriented programs.

Trends do not grow to the sky and something so fabulous as the cashless society is bound to create considerable opposition sooner or later. It is indeed possible to impose various socio-economic paradigms by force, but a sullen, coerced population is not one that is apt to be cooperative.

Certainly we can see that in Greece where the EU and its Greek proxy government still struggle to impose austerity and to collect taxes.

THE WAR ON CASH IS A WAR ON FREEDOM

The real trouble with all of these fantastical plans is that those behind them are determined to implement them and likely will do so. That they won’t work, or not well, is obviously a secondary consideration.

There will be blood. It was the title of a well-received movie and it is certainly a forecast of what is going to happen as these deeply malevolent technocratic procedures are put into action.

TDV, of course, will continue to track these trends as it has in the past. Our newsletter – which you should subscribe to here – will provide solutions that can help you position yourself and your family so that you are not taken by surprise by the gathering tide of authoritarian internationalism.

There is no reason for you to fear what is upcoming so long as you take the time to understand it and to plan for personal alternatives. History and economics show us that Dirigisme eventually implodes. It is not possible to run societies without price competition and gradually those societies that try to do so descend into chaos.

Already the market is creating innovative solutions to bypass banking systems… a little thing called bitcoin, which was the best performing currency in 2015 by a WIDE margin. Many people who don’t understand it, and fear a “cashless society”, as they should for the reasons given above, think bitcoin plays into the cashless society… it doesn’t. Bitcoin is cash… but even better. It is cash that you can store in your own brain (by remembering your password) and, if careful, no one can even know you are holding it.

This will be a major topic of conversation at our upcoming, crucial, TDV Internationalization and Investment Summit on February 18th. Amongst many topics, experts in the bitcoin space will be on hand to tell you why bitcoin (along with precious metals, of course) is so important and give you the information you need to purchase and securely store bitcoin.

We see what’s coming and we are planning well-ahead for it. It’s a race between total control/centralization and total freedom/de-centralization.

Believe me when I tell you, you will much prefer living in a world of the latter. For previews of what the former looks like, just read George Orwell’s 1984. His timing was off by a few decades but his prognosis was so accurate that it looks more like a training manual than a fiction novel today.

You won’t hear about this, nor be advised on how you can protect yourself from this war on CNBC, CNN or even in other financial newsletters. Stick with us here, and at the TDV newsletter and upcoming TDV Summit to stay one-step ahead of the game.