As an accountant I refused, pretty much, to ever account for businesses that handled cash. They were costly, uncontrolled, unreliable and frankly too commonly criminogenic in nature to take the risk of being associated with, not least because of the risk of Revenue investigation, which was real in those days.
I have worked very hard to eliminate cash from economies for this reason. So, I demanded the end of big denomination notes.
I demanded evidence of source for large deposits.
And, of course, the control of suitcases of cash in tax havens.
But I have also demanded increased transparency of banking in general to tax authorities, whilst seeking that platforms like eBay and Amazon be open to HMRC.
I believe in tax justice. Cash and opacity are its enemies. Nothing will change my position.
But I don’t need to change my position. People do not want cash. I would have thought the reasons why are obvious.
The glory of cash is the ability to be free of The Spud and his plans for how you must live your life. And the bit that The Spud forgets is that if we don’t get to use cash to do that then we’ll use something else other than cash to do that. It’s not that difficult to build up a Polanyi-esque network of mutual obligations after all. Inefficient, compared to cash, but entirely possible. And as the impositions from The Spud become greater so is the liberty enabled overcoming the inefficiencies.
The absence of cash won’t mean an end to untaxed economic activity. It’ll just mean and end to cash as the intermediation in untaxed economic activity.
Wow, banning cash is moving from “loony right wing conspiracy theory” to astroturfed political consensus pretty fucking rapido, isn’t it.
Like all those gollies on TV.
“As an accountant” was sufficient for me to ignore the rest of his witterings. Pompous deluded egomaniac
I deliberately use cash precisely so the cunts don’t know what i’m spending MY money on. People like Spud aren’t in favour of a cashless society because of any alledged criminality, it’s more to do with the fact that they are authoritarian control freaks.
This is in the pipeline – ‘Spending £5 on a burger? That’s coming out of your personal Net Zero carbon allowance and you now don’t have enough in your account for that flight to Alicante next summer’…….
Much the same reason that I use cash so much Addolff.
Of course another reason might simply be that I can’t stand all those horrid innovations.
Nothing will escape the Eye of the Potato.
Adolf/BB
Yep, that and – use it or lose it. So I do, as much as I feasibly can.
“ I have worked very hard to eliminate cash from economies for this reason. So, I demanded the end of big denomination notes.”
And if you don’t I’ll thcweam and thcweam and thcweam.
The mutual obligations represented by crypto currencies are already cost effective and private. In future they will be frictionless. Bitcoin’s original vision was electronic cash.
However, Chesterton’s gate applies here. AML/KYC exist for reasons
I demanded…
He really is a little tinpot dictator, isn’t he?
He’s quite the repellent individual isn’t he.
I believe his original practice area was mainly London luvvies and media types, not stooping to clients “in trade”.
Why on earth didn’t he become a lavatory attendant and thereby able to indulge his obsession with the inspection of everyone’s stools.
God, he must have been a shite accountant. But then, of course he was. If he’d been any good at it, he’d still be one.
I refused, pretty much
Translation for anybody unfamiliar with children who “pretty much” tidied their room and did their homework – this means he didn’t refuse.
“I have worked very hard to eliminate cash from economies for this reason”
Firstly, by not spending any cash in pubs in the Dowhnam Market area for several years and ninteenthly, by refusing to donate pennies to those annoying children that pester me every November. I don’t know who this Guy they ask money for is but he’s clearly a front for some neoliberal scheme.
Tax Justice?
How can an act commencing with the wholesale theft of the fruits of one’s labours result in “justice”?
It is difficult to see how he could have worked for a small firm of accountants in the 1980’s and 1990’s without dealing with businesses predominantly transacting in cash.
If his clients were luvvies he should have been asking what they were doing when they weren’t on stage. A lot of actors do tutoring or drama or dance lessons for cash.
As a couple of people have said
No wonder he got banned from all the pubs in Downham Market. Certainly a fair few pubs in the 90s in my part of the world (Essex) were cash only. Had he demanded to pay in card he’d have been thrown out.
Sam Duncan
He isn’t an accountant. He used his brother to sit the exams (or some other ringer) he has no understanding of accounting basics like Depreciation or Double entry bookkeeping. If he genuinely has accountancy qualifications then he’s been so long out of practice they’re worthless
Sam Jones
Spot on, As well as being a rampant anti- Semite of unparalleled viciousnesss he’s also a pathological liar. Were he an accountant in the era he posits he’d have had to handle cash.
Mark (Longrider)
He has a lot in common with a failed artist imprisoned in Germany in the 1920s. His prominence on the UK intellectual scene speaks volumes.
High brow pretentious nonsense. (Being polite). No hairdressers, window cleaners for him unless they pay extra merchant services to the big banks and see their takings drop off a cliff.
Shame on you Tim.
Whenever the bank cashier asks me why I am withdrawing cash I answer that it is in support of the continuation of branch banking and the employment of counter staff.
Another thought occurs to me – maybe he screwed up a petty cash count when he was qualifying…..
So Murphy has never bought an evening paper – or anything – from a street trader or a vending machine, does not permit children to buy sweets in a sweet shop (now called a CTN) …
When Murphy was an accountant, nearly all small purchases of bread, butter, fruit, vegetables, newspapers, stationery, train and bus tickets, cinema tickets, ice creams etc, snack lunches, let alone beer, were paid in cash. The cost of processing credit transactions was more than the price of a small loaf.
It appears that Murphy is suffering from memory loss.