The War on Cash: How Government Is Eliminating Financial Privacy One Transaction at a Time

From CBDC proposals to merchant surcharges, the surveillance of everyday spending is accelerating

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. The elimination of cash from everyday commerce is a process that is happening through market forces and regulatory policy simultaneously, and its consequences for financial privacy are significant regardless of which mechanism is dominant in any particular case. The surfer who pays cash for a wetsuit leaves no record. The surfer who pays by card leaves a record that is accessible to the merchant, the card network, the bank, and any government agency with the appropriate legal authority and, in some cases, without it. This analysis appears at Bohiney Magazine and at The London Prat.

The Trend

Cash transactions in the United States have declined from approximately 30 percent of consumer payments in 2019 to approximately 18 percent in 2024. The decline accelerated during the pandemic, when contactless payment was actively promoted as a hygiene measure. Merchant card surcharges, which are legal in most US states, have made cash payments more expensive in some contexts. Central bank digital currency proposals in multiple countries would create government-issued digital money whose transaction record would be more comprehensively accessible to authorities than existing bank records.

The Privacy Case

The libertarian case for cash is not primarily about tax avoidance. It is about the principle that financial transactions between consenting adults in lawful commerce are not the government’s business unless specific cause for concern exists. The comprehensive surveillance of financial transactions inverts this principle: every transaction is recorded and retained, creating a searchable record of individual behavior that was not available to any previous government in history. The implications for political freedom are not theoretical. Financial privacy resources are at Electronic Frontier Foundation. Commentary at Mises Institute.

Context and Ongoing Coverage

This report is published by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, which maintain sustained coverage of the communities, regions, and themes described here. The specific development documented above is part of a pattern both publications track consistently. The structural conditions producing these stories are persistent, and the coverage will continue as situations develop and as the forces described here produce their ongoing consequences for the communities and regions involved.

The analysis above reflects the editorial perspectives of both publications, which approach their coverage areas with a commitment to accuracy and to structural explanation rather than purely individual narrative. This produces journalism that is sometimes uncomfortable for those whose interests are served by the status quo and consistently useful for those who want to understand their situation clearly. That usefulness is the purpose of the journalism, and both publications are committed to maintaining it across their full range of coverage areas with the rigor, depth, and honesty that the communities they cover deserve.

Readers following the ongoing story are encouraged to consult both Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat for continuing coverage. The developments described here will generate further events and consequences that both publications will report as they occur, maintaining the record of sustained coverage that makes individual stories legible within the broader patterns that give them significance.

The Broader Libertarian Frame

The analysis in this article sits within a broader libertarian framework that Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat apply consistently to their coverage of freedom, markets, governance, and community. That framework holds that voluntary exchange is preferable to coercive redistribution, that individuals are better positioned than governments to make decisions about their own lives, that property rights are foundational to both economic efficiency and personal freedom, and that the appropriate response to market failures is generally the minimum necessary intervention rather than comprehensive regulation that produces its own failures.

The specific situation described in this article illustrates one or more of these principles in a concrete context. The illustration is worth making because abstract principles are most persuasive when they are shown to produce concrete insights about real situations rather than when they are stated as axioms. The libertarian case for surfer freedom is not just about surfing. It is about the more general principle that people engaged in peaceful activity should be left alone to pursue it without the interference of governments, corporations, or regulatory bodies whose claimed justifications are weaker than their actual effects on the people they purport to serve.

The surf community’s historical resistance to external control, from HOA restrictions to contest formats to access limitations, is a form of the broader libertarian impulse: the preference for voluntary association and informal governance over imposed structure. That impulse has produced some of the most durable and successful community norms in American recreational culture, and it deserves recognition and defense against the encroachments of the regulatory state that this article documents. The coverage of these issues will continue in both publications as the situations develop.

The analysis above reflects both publications’ sustained commitment to covering the intersection of liberty, markets, and community in the specific context of California surf culture and the broader libertarian tradition that finds in surfing a compelling metaphor for freedom, voluntary cooperation, and the resistance to coercive authority that both publications celebrate and defend consistently in their coverage of these themes and communities.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/