When you are shaken down by the police in Kenya, this is a problem with the out of control police, and not a problem with cash. Conflating the existence of cash with police corruption is not logical, and the solution is to solve the problem of the police and how they are funded, not to put everyone in a cashless society prison.

It is completely wrong to say that cash reduction will improve the lives of the average Kenyan. What will improve their lives is the elimination of the State from all financial matters. The money used by Kenyans should be gold and silver only. This would put an end to inflation for them, and act as a solid foundation for growth, whilst shrinking the size of their illegitimate, wasteful and predatory government.

The author is correct in saying that that the bad guys’ medium of choice is the greenback, but he is right only in the same sense that a stopped clock is right twice a day. The bad guys in this case are the State and the central banks who are printing money and stealing from the hapless individuals who are forced to use their fraudulent money.

If you want to cut down on bribery, tax evasion and money laundering, then you do not need to cut down on cash. You need to cut down on the State and the parasites who use violence to fleece the public. Saying that you need to eliminate cash to stop bribery is like saying you have to dynamite a house to prevent it from burning down by accident. It simply doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, and would cause harm orders of magnitude greater than the problem it is setting out to solve.

For the record, tax evasion and money laundering are not crimes, any more than miscegenation is a crime. All of these are creations of the State, directly or indirectly. Bribery can only exist where there is a State that can wield arbitrary power over individuals and their property. For example, if you need the permission of the State to put an extension on your house, and this permission must be granted by an aparatchick, then an opportunity for bribery is created that would never have existed without the State and its arbitrary laws. Jefferson would never have been able to collect bribes if he did not have the power to approve anything. This is the real problem that must be addressed; the nature of money is not related to id at all.

Cash is anything but a menace. It is a perfect, natural solution to the problem of exchanging goods of different sorts between people, without an interposing intermediary. There is no reason whatsoever to eliminate it, and anyone that suggests this does not have a full grasp on the ethics of liberty and the true nature of the State and man.

We must face these issues squarely and honestly. It is completely wrong to put everyone into a slave system of un-free money simply because the State and its operatives are running wild. Anyone who wants to think about this seriously should concentrate on identifying the real problems, and solving the root causes, instead of using artificial false problems (‘money laundering’) as a pretext to create a business model that will be forced on everyone.