Australian government proposes to limit cash payments for purchases to AUD$10K

From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cato.org&#x2F;cato-journal&#x2F;springsummer-2018&#x2F;curse-war-cash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cato.org&#x2F;cato-journal&#x2F;springsummer-2018&#x2F;curse-wa...</a><p><i>&quot;The phrase “war on cash” suggests a parallel to the “war on drugs” and aptly so. In both wars, traditional civil liberties are shunted aside in the criminalization, surveillance, and prosecution of victimless private activities<p>... The war on cash might be more accurately labelled the “war on people who use cash.” What are suppressed by the above-listed tactics are not inanimate objects but people. Cash itself experiences no harms. People do. Coercive anti-cash policies abridge the freedom and reduce the welfare of peaceful individuals who prefer to use cash.<p>... The war on cash is being waged for the exclusive benefit of those who already wield an inordinate amount of power and control over the economy and the people that are struggling in it. And they want more. By slowly, quietly killing cash, they seek to seize the last remaining thing that offers people a small semblance of privacy, anonymity, and personal freedom in their increasingly controlled and surveyed lives.&quot;</i>

Aside from the &quot;war on cash&quot; angle covered in other comments, setting these types of limits to an arbitrary dollar amount is fundamentally unjust.<p>The CTR limit of $10K in the US is well known, but when it was introduced in the 70s[1] $10K was the equivalent of around $65K in today&#x27;s money.<p>Similarly, inflation will guarantee if this is enacted Australians won&#x27;t be able to buy something like a phone, fridge or a laptop in a few decades due to the relentless progress of inflation.<p>A few decades after that they won&#x27;t be able to buy their groceries for $10K. These types of laws effectively outlaw cash entirely, they just have a time delay until they come into full effect.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;repositorio.comillas.edu&#x2F;rest&#x2F;bitstreams&#x2F;38908&#x2F;retrieve" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;repositorio.comillas.edu&#x2F;rest&#x2F;bitstreams&#x2F;38908&#x2F;retri...</a>

Italy has a limit of 3,000 Euro for cash payments. There is a table with the limits since the early &#x27;90s at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codiceazienda.it&#x2F;limite-contanti-tabella-riepilogativa&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codiceazienda.it&#x2F;limite-contanti-tabella-riepilo...</a> (reference to the law, dd&#x2F;mm&#x2F;yyyy, limit.) The first one is in Liras, about 10k Euro.<p>My feeling is that it did little to achieve the desired result at least about money laundering. Apparently there are so many other ways to do that. For lawful expenses, checks (almost obsolete), bank transfers or credit cards are more convenient than getting cash at an ATM.

Some while back a bank ceo floated the idea of negative interest rates for consumer deposits. Not negative as in less than inflation but literally negative.<p>If banks are allowed to kill the utility of transacting business with cash I would fully expect the amount of money sucked out of the economy by the banking sector to increase in fees to hold and transfer money.<p>Cash transaction are a hard break on how asinine you can be without your customers deciding to do business with nobody.

So, no more paying for things in Australia with more than $7500 USD? Brutal. Pretty soon it won&#x27;t be legal to even pay your rent with cash.<p>As far as I know various $10,000 reporting laws started in the 1970s. That&#x27;s more than $60,000 in today&#x27;s money. Have these limits ever been adjusted for inflation in any country?

Is this a bid by Credit Card companies to force everyone to pay them, or so that when you step out of line they can control you by controlling your access to resources?<p>Either way, impeding your ability to purchase things in any manner you (and your vendor or customer) see fit isn&#x27;t okay by me.

This flies in the face of liberal democratic tradition. It effectively makes it mandatory to utilize a network, that bars any party not licensed by the government from acting as a node (the inter-bank network), for any significant economic exchange.<p>I suspect that by increasing the cost of law abidance, it will encourage defection from the formal economy and its democratically accountable judicial system.

Any push for eliminating cash is just another version of the nonsensical &quot;if you have nothing to hide...&quot; argument all over again to curb freedoms.<p>&gt; If we are going to refer to bank payments as ‘cashless’, we should then refer to cash payments as ‘bankless’. Because that’s what cash is, and right now it is the only thing standing between us and a completely privatised money system. [1]<p>For those who are arguing about an inevitable future where cash won&#x27;t exist, I&#x27;ll just say that people will find other ways to transact (like barter, cryptocurrency, shadow currencies). And those will be for legal purposes and illegal purposes, depending on the people and the situation. Blanket assumptions of crime and illegal activities with cash are extremely naïve.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aeon.co&#x2F;essays&#x2F;if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is-good-will-be-lost" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aeon.co&#x2F;essays&#x2F;if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is...</a>

Cigarette taxes north of $30&#x2F;pack cause smuggling? I&#x27;m shocked to find gambling in this establishment!

How about publishing all government transactions, excluding salaries if we must.<p>If that works out well we can move on to publishing all transactions over a certain threshold (over a certain timeframe so you can&#x27;t split the transactions). And publish all transactions that go to certain countries on black or grey lists.<p>Limiting cash transaction is a okay thing be there&#x27;s much bigger fish to catch, if only politics meant it seriously.

The state will always seek more control over the individual, this is the state&#x27;s MO.<p>There is a slope and it&#x27;s very slippery.

Note that an important clarification is that person-to-person transactions are still permitted in cash, without limit.<p>So if you want to sell your house, and someone else wants to pay for it in cash, then you&#x27;re all fine.

It&#x27;s not just the &quot;war on cash&quot;. This &quot;PAYG&quot; thing is screwing over taxpayers. They could otherwise invest that money, make a return, then divest before the end of the year, earning a small profit. This robs them of that right so the government can instead. Disgusting.

So, two questions:<p>- how many purely above board transactions of this value are there to be affected by this?<p>- if people are to insist on financial anonymity, how is the tax burden to be distributed fairly?

The problems with this go a lot deeper than most people realize, but I can&#x27;t summarize them here. I strongly recommend reading the following paper to understand the importance of cash:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paecon.net&#x2F;PAEReview&#x2F;issue80&#x2F;Huber80.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paecon.net&#x2F;PAEReview&#x2F;issue80&#x2F;Huber80.pdf</a> Huber, Joseph - Split-circuit reserve banking - functioning, dysfunctions and future perspectives<p>Abstract: &quot;This paper first provides a detailed outline of how the present money system works. This then serves as a backdrop to discuss a number of orthodox fallacies and heterodox flaws in money theory, followed by a summary of the dysfunctions of split-circuit reserve banking and a brief outlook on the perspective of a single-circuit sovereign money system.&quot;<p>Keywords: monetary economics, money theory, credit creation, banking theory, fractional reserve banking, monetary policy, monetary reform<p>One may find comments on the paper here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rwer.wordpress.com&#x2F;comments-on-rwer-issue-no-80&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rwer.wordpress.com&#x2F;comments-on-rwer-issue-no-80&#x2F;</a>

The path to hell is paved with good intentions.

The so-called &#x27;war on cash&#x27; seems to be progressing nicely.<p>Don&#x27;t the bankers know that this will only make cryptocurrency more attractive to those who want privacy?

<i>Physical</i> currency is going away in our lifetimes. What it is replaced by (digital cash owned by governments, corporate scrip, independent decentralised currencies) is up for debate, but its demise is not.<p>Physical currency is controlled by governments, since it is expensive to produce and distribute, and network-connected payments are becoming more and more prevalent, it is inevitable that at some point the cost benefit ratio becomes untenable for governments and they remove this option.<p>If you fight for its existence against the government which claims sole jurisdiction over it in the first place, you&#x27;re fighting yesterday&#x27;s war, and doomed to lose, better instead to imagine a different future based on digital currencies (of whatever stripe). I&#x27;m not keen on bitcoin et al, but the future is clearly not in physical tokens which represent fixed denominations of currency.<p>If you were starting a currency today, would you start with cash?

The best thing they could do to get people not to use cash for legal transactions is to increase the interest rates.<p>People doing illegal transactions will just use a substitute.

Australia tax things like cigarettes massively. I think any black market tobacco is because of their excessive taxing

I think both the US and Australia (and probably other countries), should just do away with the $50 and $100 bills. It becomes a lot more inconvenient if you have to carry around 5 times as many briefcases of cash for illegal transactions.

so how many of you who is opppsing this has paid for or sold something in cash amount larger than 10k? Other than buying a used vehicle I dont think regular people engage in large cash transactions. While tons of untaxed money changes hands between rich crooks to buy and sell valuable items bypassing any taxation or tracing. Before you start advocating for rich crooks, think again what is in it for you that you want to fight for it so bad

This is totally inevitable everywhere and in fact cash itself will probably be gone by 2050. Make whatever principled claims you wish but I would almost bet money that 80%+ of cash purchases over $10k even today have something dodgy about where that money came from. You think governments don&#x27;t know that? Their whole job is to prevent crime. This will make money laundering much harder and <i>you know that</i>. If the collateral damage is that lone couple of paranoid weirdos in each city who don&#x27;t trust banks and actually store their savings under the mattress, well so be it.<p>The appropriate response to this is not to try to ban it in the name of &quot;privacy&quot; because the stats will overwhelmingly not be in your favour. The correct response is to demand and implement appropriate and ironclad data privacy laws which make it literally impossible for agencies to do whole-database searches, go on fishing trips, or other abuses of data collection tech. A police agency should not be able to query every name who made a large-amount purchase. However, they should be able to, given a name, see what purchases that person has made. This is a <i>critical</i> distinction.<p>Give up with the &quot;the government should not be able to track my money flows!&quot; argument. Might makes right, basically. Instead, focus your energy on legally constraining the use of that data to conform to principles of reasonable freedom and dignity. That is the only approach that will work, IMO.