Preservation of Personal Freedom and Property Rights in Florida

After some research I came to found out that there is no Federal Statute that forces any entity, public or private, to accept cash money. This means that anyone and everyone has to choice to refuse your payment, if you opt to pay in cash. It is left up to the States to legislate whether or not acceptance of circulating currency is mandatory as form of payment.

If paper money, or fiat money, has little and ever decreasing intrinsic value, digital money is much worse. If you have 10 US dollars in paper money in your possession, nobody can tell you that no, you don’t have 10 US dollars, but you have 9 instead. At some point the government may (and probably will, given the direction things are going) confiscate part of everybody’s money by imposing what will be called a “wealth tax”. Such wealth tax will be introduced to the masses as the idea of “taking away a little bit from those who have too much” or, using one of their favorite mantras “making them pay their fair share”, so the herd will enthusiastically bleat “stick it to the rich!”. But in reality, it will be the gateway for the government to force people to pay extra for everything they own – on an ongoing basis: their house, their car, their electronic equipment, even their pets. It is nearly impossible to enforce a wealth tax on a cash economy. It would be the easiest thing in the World to impose a wealth tax on digital currency.

A cashless economy will take away the last vestige of private property, and with it the last vestige of personal freedom as well. Digital cash is nothing but a system of credits, where you are given “points” in exchange for your labor, for some good you offer, or service you provide. It is up to the government and politicians then to decide how many “points” you will get and it is therefore a drastic departure from a meritocracy and a free market economy.

The government could also take away some of your credits if you incur in some behavior the government disapproves of (in fact, something along those lines is already taking place in China), if you say something deemed “unacceptable”, or whatever they decide is “inappropriate”. Of course, it will be a privilege of the power elite to decide what is acceptable and what isn’t.

In other Words, an economy/society based on digital money would be Orwell’s 1984 on steroids.

It is then essential that the State of Florida creates a statute that makes mandatory the acceptance of circulating currency as form of payment.