Perspective

Religion is about miracle chasing and doctrine keeping.

Knowing G-d has to do with everything else.

Bad Idea

There was a time when I had so many cards crammed into a leather wallet that I had a hard time getting them out to pay for things. They were stuffed in there two and three to a pocket. I emptied the thing out and the deck of plastic was nearly a half-inch thick. So then I thought that it would be a lot easier if I had just one. I was seeing the utility of a single card that could sub for driver’s license, insurance card, credit card, ATM card, work ID and for those fund raiser discount cards that people sell at work for their kids school. Seemed to make sense at the time. Of course I didn’t realise then that there were others who were thinking along those lines.

It’s. A. Bad. Idea.

It’s one thing for banks to create money with a pen stroke and charge interest for it. It is quite another to eliminate cash altogether and live totally on a Federal Reserve Giftcard that has to be recharged every payday. Yes that is kind of how our bank accounts work but those are our bank accounts. We went out and chose the banks and got the accounts set up. We chose the direct deposit option, if that’s what you’re doing. And if they screw up our accounts badly enough, which happens from time to time, we can choose to not do business with them. When the means of getting access to your money is issued to you, you have no choice. If the teller, who will eventually dislike the system, decides to conduct himself with a bad attitude you have little in the way of recourse. You can go down the street to another teller who hates the way things are as much as her colleague.

Right now, the people who refuse to deal with banks take their paychecks and cash them. They pay a commission for the privilege but it’s their choice. It is these people that the robber-centralisers will begin their program with. They’ll come up with a way, and they may already have, of forcing them to take the card. The rhetoric will be that it is for their own good and safety and when they decide that is working with the “underground” economy they’ll come slouching in our direction to sell us on the same thing.