Like all new frontiers touted as necessary and worthwhile, the cashless society is advertised as a supremely convenient way to facilitate financial transactions while avoiding such silly inconveniences as carrying cash and scouting for a money dispenser.  A cashless society also facilitates inequality, manifests a pattern of conduct easily monitored by both private companies and State agencies, and repudiates the notion of valid tender.  It also subordinates its users to a digital ecosystem that can, at any given moment, fail.

The literature on the problems of a cashless cosmos is only growing, though it has done little to stem what has been decided as inevitable by the policy wonks.  While it is exceptionally zealous in this regard, Sweden remains a good example of this push, a country which has done much to remove the infrastructure that enables cash payments over the counter.  Businesses have the right to waive the use of cash payments under the principle of “freedom of contract”.   Those impelled to use cash are condemned to hermetic “cash bubbles”, isolated from much of the economy. 

Payment systems operate on a logic different from such financial areas as asset management or investment.  The authors of a most useful article in the Social-Economic Review from April 2025 make the point that cash is fundamentally inclusive, as it can be used by all under the same conditions.  The infrastructure of the cashless society is........

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