Ted Rall for September 05, 2014

Government would be able to turn people who annoy them into paupers with a flip of a switch, sure.

But it would be way more efficient to just contract it out to Blackwater/Halliburton.

You don’t have debit-cards, smart-money cards? But I suppose that isn’t Rall’s point.A cashless society = privacy-less society

That sounds a lot like, ‘…if you aren’t saying anything illegal, you don’t have to WORRY about tapped phones and e-mail.’.But what happens if you say ‘…maybe I’m tired of Democrats, and I’ll vote Republican.‘?.Or in four years, ’…maybe I’m tired of Republicans, and I’ll vote Democrat.’?

governments will be able to turn people who annoy them into paupers…

If by “governments” you mean government employee with a grudge and any person or company who bought backdoor software access, then yes.

The backdoors are for our Patriot Act safety, of course. We can’t be safe unless we give up every privacy.

I noticed that too. Good catch.

Whereas that sounds nice, in reality I really, really wouldn’t want anybody to be able to see what I spend my money on. That’s just a little TMI.

If the person spoken of in the last panel is Snowden — do it.

Say no to drones.

Most, if not all of us, wrote checks for years. Not a big difference between MICR (the magnetic ink on the bottom of the check) and the bar codes/magnetic strips/QRs/microchip/etc that make up our debit and credit cards. I quit writing checks a few years back. Don’t miss them. I do use credit and debit, but I still try to use cash. Seems self-defeating getting money from an ATM, but it’s not. Get a chunk of cash from the ATM. That’s the only traceable transaction. How and where you spend that cash is invisible for the most part. Frankly, I don’t much care about myself, I’m retired and not into anything “wrong”. I fear for future generations. The expectation of privacy is a slowly bursting bubble.

Ted, see Heinlein’s book Friday, published in 1982. Lays it out quite nicely.

“This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” Hummmpf.

(Don’t know, but Scalzi said he appreciated the reference and the cartoon.)

How do people without credit or debit cards get airline tickets? And without tickets, how to they get boarding passes? And without boarding passes, how to they get through security to the place that doesn’t take cash?

Good one

I’m surprised that no one has commented about the “this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private” phrase on U.S. money. Looks to me like a business is REQUIRED to take your money. Then I found this response on Yahoo answers:

“Basically what it means is, the business is required to accept payment of the debt in Federal currency… they just don’t have to accept it FROM YOU that way”.

Yet another illustration of Newspeak. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Rejection (of money) is acceptance.