About:
[Louisiana] House bill 195 basically says those who buy and sell
second hand goods cannot use cash to make those transactions,
Darryl wrote:
> Surely that has to be illegal. Not allowing "coin of the realm" for
> purchase of anything one wants to buy?
Notice that "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and
private" supposes an existing debt.
(Doing a little Wikipediation here for the right terminology...)
In general [1], displaying stuff for sale is taken to be an
"invitation to treat". No obligation to sell to you or anybody in
particular automatically ensues. If I've already served you lunch and
you've eaten it, a debt exists and I have to accept "legal tender" in
settlement of the debt. But if I don't like your looks or the color
of your money, I'm not obliged to accept your cash -- "legal tender"
-- when you offer it in response to my "invitation to treat", which
is:
"an expression of willingness to negotiate. A person making an
invitation to treat does not intend to be bound as soon as it is
accepted by the person to whom the statement is addressed." [2]
All this is, as your response evinces, contrary to widely -- nearly
universally -- held belief. Abruptly and widely contravening that
belief would no doubt lead to outrage less amicable than OWS on the
part of those who depend on cash. That is, a sudden government
proclamation of a cashless society would be very messy but there is,
AFAIK, nothing to prevent it, either in the US Constitution or in
common law.
In this light, the situation that has been implemented in the last
decade or three, (that welfare, pension, disability and other
government support payments are issued as checks or direct-deposit
that can be turned into cash by the recipient only if [s]he has a bank
account,) has laid some of the groundwork for just such a
proclamation. So has the promotion and high level of acceptance of
debit & credit cards. What level of penetration of digital or
otherwise documented payment methodology is required before cash can
be officially terminated with only anticipated and acceptable levels
of chaos?
It's already the case that people who don't use credit/debit cards are
regarded at best as eccentric, more likely as highly suspicious. The
IRS, DHS, FBI, ICE, BATFE, DEA (not to overlook the NYPD, LAPD, RCMP
etc.) and other TLAs would love to have available megadatabases of
all (putatively) legit transactions and a legal assumption that
undocumented -- i.e. cash -- transactions are intrinsically criminal.
It's already reached the point at which observations such as the one
you're presently reading may be tagged with the opprobrium of
"conspiracy theory" and dismissed. At the risk of beating a metaphor
to death, have a Naked Lunch and see what's on the end of your fork.
...people are not bribed to shut up about what they know.
They are bribed not to know it.
-- William Burroughs, _Naked Lunch_
FWIW,
- Mike
[1] Hedged about, however, with divers jurisdictional variations, case
law widely applicable to transactions structured in specific ways,
explicit law and regulation, what a particular judge had for lunch
and the phase of the moon.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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