Didn't file your taxes on time? Accused of a petty crime? Forgot to pledge your allegiance to Moloch the Almighty? In a cashless society, your life would be over until such time as you "made good" with the government.

This is essentially what legendary investor Jim Rogers warned about during a recent interview with MacroVoices Podcast:

Convenience will replace freedom Some states in the US you cannot make cash transactions above a certain amount. Governments love it. Then they can control you. If you want to go and buy a cup of coffee, they know how many you drink, where you buy them, etc., if they can all put it into electronic formats and they will. The world is all going electronic. When it's done, the governments are going to be very, very happy they are going to say they're doing it for our own good, this is not them, this is for our good. That they're doing this, but it’s coming, and it's going to be a whole different world in which we live. Probably we are not going to have as many freedoms as we have now even though we are already losing our freedoms at a significant pace.

How will they justify this incredible invasion of privacy and personal liberty? Terrorism! We have to stop people from using briefcases of cash to fund terrorism! Because of course, it's private individuals — not goverments, like the snakes in Washington or Rhiyad — who fund terrorism. That's the fairy tale we're all supposed to believe, of course.

Rogers is aware of this and according to him, there's not much that can be done:

Payments in cash are widely used in the financing of terrorist activities… In this context, the relevance of potential upper limits to cash payments could also be explored. Several Member States have in place prohibitions for cash payments above a specific threshold

Our cashless future will be "marketed" in other ways, of course. It will be very "convenient". We already see this talking point being used to promote electronic payments used in every aspect of our daily lives:

Plenty of corporations are openly salivating at the possibility of abolishing cash — especially companies already in the "cashless" business.

And look, young hip kids are already getting excited about it:

So it's either we all end up as feudal serfs for a monolithic Government-Coropration or die in a nuclear war fought over the soverignty of Limpopo. The End.