Spain Bans Cash
The Daily Bell
Friday, April 20, 2012
Spain Bans Cash Transactions Over 2,500 Euros … Spain has outlawed the use of cash in business transactions in excess 2,500 euros in order to crack down on the black market and tax evaders. The motivations behind the push for digital currencies is exposed as Spain heads down the road of the Greeks in combating their sovereign debt crisis. As the government scrambles for every tax dollar it can get its hands on, even though they already gave every Spaniard $23,000 Euros in debt last year alone (approximately $32,500), they are now banning all large cash business transactions. Why? So they can track the transactions and make sure that people and business are paying taxes. Being able to track the transactions is also aimed to combat the growing black market in Spain. – Alexander Higgins’ blog
Dominant Social Theme: This cash has gotta go. It’s evil.
Free-Market Analysis: They are not even making a pretense anymore that the West is run via market economies. As we have long predicted, the phony “sovereign debt” crisis in Europe is being used to justify all sorts of authoritarian measures.
It is government pols that gladly borrowed what European banks threw at them. And somehow the upshot earlier this week is that Spanish citizens now lose the right to conduct many transactions in cash.
Spectactularly, the reports such as this one, excerpted above, don’t even both to hide the real point. The Spanish government wants to ensure that it can “track transactions and make sure that people and businesses are paying taxes.”
Of course, anyone who has visited Spain of late knows that the tax burden in Spain is onerous indeed, and is one reason that the truculent tribes that have co-existed uneasily with Madrid are again beginning to beat the drums of secession.
The taxes that the central government levies on small businesses especially are verging on punitive. But there are no apologies. The official position is one of unflinching demands.
It is surely part of a larger meme having to do with a “cashless” society. Just recently the UK Telegraph asked “Is mobile the way we’ll all be paying?” The answer, as can be expected, was a qualified yes, but issued in the predictable upbeat way.
The cashless society has been a much-mooted concept ever since consumer credit cards were widely introduced in the 1950s. Now it seems that “mobile money” is the new gold rush. The term – used to describe the way the mobile phone is used to pay for goods – yields no fewer than 126 million results on a Google search …
The Rest…HERE
