Cash and Freedom

"Keep the change."
--Latrell Walker (Exit Wounds)

Relating to a previous post about eliminating large denomination currency, a University of Tennessee law professor observes that because inflation has eroded the value of money, a $100 bill today is worth only a fraction of what it could buy just a few decades ago.

Stated differently, large denomination money is not all that large when its current purchasing power is considered. As inflation continues to erode value, then larger bills will be required because small bills, such as the dollar, will be next to worthless (the current value of the penny is a good analogy).

More importantly, the author notes that banning denominations of cash gives bureaucrats more control over people's lives:

"Cash has a lot of virtues. One of them is that it allows people to engage in voluntary transactions without the knowledge or permission of anyone else. Governments call this suspicious, but the rest of us call it something else: Freedom."