War On Cash Goes into Full Effect — Purchases Over $10,000 ILLEGAL in Australia

By Jay Syrmopoulos

 Canberra, Australia – The Australian government announced  that it will soon be illegal to use more than $10,000 cash to purchase  anything, forcing individuals that wish to buy more expensive items to  use a cashier’s check or electronic transfer, ostensibly in the name of  fighting organized crime and money laundering. The move reportedly comes in response to the government’s Black  Economy Standing Taskforce. In addition to the cash purchase ban, the  government has allocated a $319 million package to the Tax Office to  develop new strategies to target the black economy. 

Treasurer Scott Morrison said the Black Economy Standing Taskforce  will include a rigorous identification system and “mobile strike teams,”  in an effort to detect people making suspicious cash transactions, as  well as a black economy hotline for citizens to report anyone suspected  of engaging in illegal transactions. 

“Cash provides an easy, anonymous and largely untraceable mechanism for conducting black economy activity,” the response said.  “Cash payments make it easier to under-report income and avoid tax  obligations. This allows businesses transacting in cash to undercut  competitors and gain a competitive advantage.” 

It said the task force had identified examples of “large undocumented cash payments being made for houses, cars, yachts, agricultural crops and commodities”, which contribute to the $50 billion black economy and “hurt honest businesses.”

 Revenue Minister Kelly O’Dwyer said the ban on cash purchases of more than $10,000 would begin on July 1 of next year. “This cash payment limit will capture high-value transactions and  help stamp out opportunities for criminals to launder the proceeds of  crime into goods and services, or for businesses to hide transactions to  reduce their tax liabilities,” she said. This of course is not a phenomenon unique to Australia, as there is  an ongoing international “war on cash.” 

In the United States, Larry  Summers, a former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard president, pushed  and effort during the Obama administration to abolish $50 and $100  bills. There has also been talk within the EU of doing away with the  €500 note. 

India has already made such moves.  While the publicly stated reason for these policies is to fight  criminals, terrorists, money launderers, drug dealer, etc., by making it  more difficult for them to move cash, the actual reason for the  international “war on cash” is to give government more control and  power. 

A report in The Atlantic  explains that while some believe that a cashless system would be  “simple and elegant,” there are ominous implications about further  centralization of power that must be considered: 

Federal, state, and local law enforcement, as well as tax  authorities, want to bring as much of the economy under their direct  supervision as possible. … Forget folks who like cash. Never mind  worries about forcing us all to run all spending through a corrupt  corporate-banking system. Never mind the resilience of having a medium  of exchange in the non-digital world that works when the power grid is  down, when one’s smart phone is dropped in water, when one’s identity is  stolen by hackers, or one’s account frozen by Visa or Bank of America  because a purchase on vacation was deemed suspicious.

Friedersdorf goes on to clarify how the elimination of cash could  dramatically erode financial privacy; pointing to Supreme Court case U.S. v. Miller: 

There is no legitimate “expectation of privacy” in the  contents of the original checks and deposit slips, since the checks are  not confidential communications, but negotiable instruments to be used  in commercial transactions, and all the documents obtained contain only  information voluntarily conveyed to the banks and exposed to their  employees in the ordinary course of business.

In a report for Forbes magazie, founder Steve Forbes elaborates on this line of thinking: 

The real reason for this war on cash–start with the big  bills and then work your way down–is an ugly power grab by Big  Government. People will have less privacy: Electronic commerce makes it  easier for Big Brother to see what we’re doing, thereby making it  simpler to bar activities it doesn’t like, such as purchasing salt,  sugar, big bottles of soda and Big Macs.

The movement against cash is clearly about centralized control of the  economy, as international bureaucrats believe they can control the  global economy better than the free market. Forbes goes on to explain: 

The move to destroy cash feeds into the economic  commissars’ fantasy that they can better control the economy.  Policymakers in Washington, Tokyo and the EU think the reason that their  economies are stagnant is that ornery people aren’t spending and  investing the way they should. How to make these benighted, recalcitrant  beings do what they’re supposed to do? The latest nostrum from our  overlords is negative interest rates. If people have to pay fees to  store their money, as they do to put their stuff in storage facilities,  then, by golly, they might be more inclined to spend it. To inhibit cash  hoarding—when Japan announced it was imposing negative interest rates,  the sale of safes soared—the authorities will want to do away with large  notes.

Of course, one of the primary purposes of the Australian government’s  movement against black markets and large cash purchases comes down to  lost revenue for the state. In fact, the government reported that the  package against black markets could potentially net the state billions  of dollars more in revenue. So, while governments like to use fear mongering about terrorism and  drugs as a means of eliciting support for policies restricting the use  of cash, the real motive behind these laws is clearly to give government  more power. The ability to track every transaction provides an  invaluable asset to a global spying apparatus (Five Eyes) that aims to  sweep up all available information with no regard for the existence of  individual privacy. 

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