There’s that old expression about the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’. It sounds nice, but in practice the enemy of your enemy is your friend up until your enemy is defeated…then the odds are pretty good that new friend will be your next enemy. (cough*WW2 and the Soviets*cough).
Here’s an article about how the trend towards being a ‘cashless society’ will be racist, classist, and a host of other -ists because poor people and people of color somehow are unable to get a debit card. (“Retailers want to go cashless. But opponents say that’s discriminatory“) So, what these self-appointed guardians of equality are proposing is that it be legislatively mandated that a business must take cash.
Hold that thought a minute, and go read this article. (“New York Times Wants To Have Credit Card Companies Monitor Sales of Guns and Ammo. What Could Ever Go Wrong?“) Here, the NY Times, a bastion of journalistic…uhm…well, something…, feels that consumer credit companies (and I would imagine, by extension, bank debit card holders) flag transactions for ‘the authorities” when a customer purchases certain quantities of guns/ammo.
Many credit card companies already have positions on what sort of transactions they will not partake in. It’s not hard to imagine that with the ‘do it for the children’ crowd leaning on them , that they’d cave and prohibit the use of their services on ‘forbidden’ services/transactions.
So, it isn’t a stretch to imagine the day when many stores are cashless and your only recourse for payment is to use your debit/credit card. Except that when you try to buy a rifle or magazine or ammo….-DECLINED-. And since the vendor is cashless, you’re choices are now pretty severely limited. It’s a tidy end run around that pesky right to bear arms thing. There’s no right to purchase arms…so they’ll simply make the transaction as onerous and difficult as possible: make it so you can only pay with a card, and make the terms of the card such that you can’t buy guns.
Thus, strangely, I’m in the camp of those folks saying that businesses should take cash (although I disagree about forcing them to). Not because I care about some meth tweaker or welfare queen who can’t get a checking account, but because cash gives me a degree of anonymity and privacy that I demand. Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.
As a businessman, I recognize that cash presents a bunch of challenges…miscounting, theft, attractive nuisance, disease vector, time sink, etc, etc. And people paying by card are far more likely to spend more money and do it more often than those who use greenbacks. (Which is why Vegas gives you chips to bet with instead of real money.) But as a survivalist and lover of liberty and privacy, cash possesses some very handy qualities that I desire, not the least of which are privacy.
Its interesting how seemingly unrelated ideas or events – ‘going cashless’ and turning credit card companies into watchdogs of the public welfare – can combine to present such hazards to folks like you and I.
Re: … businesses should take cash (although I disagree about forcing them to).
I won’t disagree with the thought but a common currency is what unites our business nationwide. I can travel from Florida to Washington and anywhere along the way, my “money” is accepted. It’s the credit cards that I don’t believe they should be “forced” to accept.
My bills state:
“This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private”
though I’d be happy if it still said:
“In silver (or gold) payable to the bearer on demand”
It does say that its legal tender, but nowhere does it say you are obligated to accept it.
As for a common currency, its looking like electronic exchanges are rapidly becoming that common currency.
I was under the impression that it was required to accept cash.
Not that well enforced, but it was a requirement.
(It might have been so in one of the states I used to live in, SC, I think, and might not be elsewhere, granted.)
Indeed there will be ‘good money’ and ‘bad money’, a la China’s social credit score system.
I’m very confident that when cash ‘goes away’, barter will return.
Someone will always take cash or solicit business with socially unacceptable BadThink items. You might pay more. Look at bad credit car lots, payday loan places, etc. No one stays ideologically pure in the face of cash. Look at Mel Gibson, Jew Hater, back in Hollywood acting because his name sells tickets ( this is assuming you think Jews control Hollywood. I don’t necessarily, just using one of the big myths to make a point ).
The more apt phrase is “The enemy of my enemy, is my enemy’s enemy. Nothing more, nothing less.”
In the marketplace, everything has a price — and virtue-signalling doesn’t pay the shareholders any dividends.
Visa and MasterCard stop doing business with gun-dealers? Someone else will come along and fill the need. Google-up “GPal” and “Ben Cannon” for an example of such — and note it’s also a cautionary tale of “too good to be true”…
The free market, like nature, abhors a vacuum. I remember the Gpal dumpster fire quite well. Virtue signalling does pay off if the alternative is a massive boycott of your product, or a legislative edict rather than ‘voluntary compliance’… Operation Chokepoint springs to mind.
Where is/was the “massive boycott”?
The various virtue-signalling actions after the Parkhill atrocity were top-down directives from corporate flunkies. The subsequent fallout suggests the opposite: market-share losses for Yeti, significant losses for Dick’s Sporting Goods…
“Operation Chokepoint” was another directed operation — by the Obama White House — not a “massive boycott.”
In schadenfreude news, Ben Cannon of GPal fame is looking at massive civil liability — and I would expect criminal liability as well — as the unlicensed “electrical contractor” who allegedly wired the “Ghost Ship” warehouse/apartments/”spaces” that burned down a couple of years ago, killing 36 or so hipsters. Sit on the banks of the river long enough, and you may see the corpses of your enemies drift past…
If you buy a firearm through an FFL, is there any value to paying cash versus using a credit, in terms of anonymity? There’s already a paper trail that the FFL creates, so what’s one more digital record of the transaction? For that matter, does Chase or Visa know that I bought a rifle, just because I spend $1,200 at Brownells?
On a different but related topic, what’s your opinion of digital vs paper NCIS forms when buying a firearm?
Regarding cash vs. plastic, I would suppose that if you pay by plastic you’ve added another layer of paper trail. That is to say, while there is the 4473 record of the purchase there is also now a credit card history. Someone could review your statements, say, for the last 90 days and see purchases from Brownell’s, Buds Gun Shop, Cheaper Than Dirt, and figure something out.
As far as NICs, both versions still send the data to the same place at the same time, so I dont see a difference.
That depends on how the company implements their credit card system – for many companies, the credit card company sees a purchase for $xxx at Joe’s Outdoor Store. But some companies (I don’t know how many) are much more tightly connected and there the credit card company sees that you bought abc gun for $yy, de magazines for abc gun for $zz each, ghi holster for $hh, etc.
While I prefer cash, I am much more comfortable with the first option than the second. My understanding is that Walmart is one of the companies that does the second, but I could be wrong.
If the clerk has to punch a number into the card reader, there is no sharing beyond the total amount and the location purchased; if the card is swiped directly on the register, more data can be transferred, but I don’t know how often it is.
As far as paper vs. electronic 4473’s – they are a similar situation. With paper, the ATF (or anybody else) has to come and look at it to get any details. With electronic systems, all of the data is on a computer somewhere. Where the data is stored and who has access to it depends on the company – I don’t know enough about the systems involved to know what the ATF has access to or if the software companies sell/ give/ distribute their data to others.
It would be more honest for the Proverb to say –
“The enemy of my enemy
might be my enemy too.”
Of COURSE I’m paranoid –
But am I paranoid enough to be right….
I wonder if you could get around that by bartering. I’ll take 30oz of silver for an AR… Just thinking out loud.
Somewhere in this blog theres a picture of someone doing just that.
You might want to hold out for 100oz, the day is coming!!!haha
Aside from the anonymity aspect, paying cash is an efficient way to stay on a budget. If you can’t pay for it with cash, you can’t afford it… yet…. With the exception of buying Real Estate, which few of us mortals can afford to do, there is no need to buy anything on “credit” other than building an acceptable credit reference.
In our modern times with so much stuff being purchased through the internet from many states away, credit cards are the most simplistic way to purchase. It takes a little more effort but the same can be done simply by calling, ordering, obtaining an order number, then agreeing to send cashiers check or money order for said order, once they receive the money the order can then be sent out. Not many businesses are willing to go through the hassle, but if there is a large enough order at stake, my belief is they will reconsider.
I pay cash for practically everything, even local bills. If a business refuses to take payment in cash, well, ok, that becomes a loss for them for whatever you were about to spend whether it be $100 or $1,000. It’s their loss, I’ll simply go somewhere else, even if it is an extra effort. Bottom line is it’s no ones business where or on what I spend my money. Checks and credit cards are simply an easier way of doing business…. And keeping track of whom is doing what and when……
Go to a store buy a Prepaid Mastercard (Gift card) with your charge card if you have to or pay cash. No problems and no hacking issue, and no gun sale declined . I do this all the time.
Reloadable gift card……..
Only problem is the limits; some reloadable cards max at $250; others I’ve seen go up to $500. Have you found one that goes higher? With a reasonable reload fee?
You can purchase more than 1. Mastercard gift cards also are automatically registered at purchase . where others you have to go online and do that .You can always contact the seller and tell them what you are using.
I never reload. the cards that is.
I use a reloadable card (no charges to reload) at a couple places where I shop often and the sales rarely come to more than $5.00. I figure it’s one less person looking at my debit card and the stores give me a little bonus when I reach “X” dollars worth of purchases.
I don’t like companies who don’t accept cash, though I accept their reason for doing it if they are in a bad neighborhood and it helps cut down on robberies…
I was in a coffee shop with my wife recently that only accepted cards… they claimed it was to speed up service, but the card machine required so many clicks, accepts, and a signature (for all of $3!) that there is NO WAY it was actually faster than cash, so I was left wondering if they actually believed it was faster than cash, or if the management wasn’t telling people the real reason.
We could take a lesson from other countries that have gone more cashless than we have, but I doubt we will…
One example is Sweden; the majority of transactions are now cashless. The government is concerned that these transactions require both electricity and data (internet or phone, almost universally internet these days) – they realize that in case of disaster neither will be available and are, at least for now, stopping their plans to further phase out cash use while they figure out how to make a more resilient cashless system.
Cashless equals control. Cash and gold and silver and brass and lead gives you the control. Of course they will frame it in the light that they are doing us a favor or helping make our lives better.