cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11683421
The EU has quietly imposed cash limits EU-wide:
- €3k limit on anonymous payments
- €10k limit regardless (link which also lists state-by-state limits).
From the jailed¹ article:
An EU-wide maximum limit of €10 000 is set for cash payments, which will make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money.
It will also strip dignity and autonomy from non-criminal adults, you nannying assholes!
In addition, according to the provisional agreement, obliged entities will need to identify and verify the identity of a person who carries out an occasional transaction in cash between €3 000 and €10 000.
The hunt for “money launderers” and “terrorists” is not likely meaningfully facilitated by depriving the privacy of people involved in small €3k transactions. It’s a bogus excuse for empowering a police surveillance state. It’s a shame how quietly this apparently happened. No news or chatter about it.
¹ the EU’s own website is an exclusive privacy-abusing Cloudflare site inaccessible several demographics of people. Sad that we need to rely on the website of a US library to get equitable access to official EU communication.
update
The Pirate party’s reaction is spot on. They also point out that cryptocurrency is affected. Which in the end amounts to forced banking.
#warOnCash
Tax evasion and money laundering rob all of us. I don’t like that we have to do this but it’s a necessary change.
This is stupid, money in that range is irrelevant on a national scale. The real laundering and robbing happens in the millions and billions and is committed by people in suits gifting each other yachts and real estate.
Ultra rich don’t evade taxes, they avoid them via good accountants legally. What this is supposed to prevent is small/medium tax fraud which really adds up.
But as @somguy69 said, money laundering is not committed by the middle and lower classes. Using anti-terror tools against someone who neglects to declare some small income. It’s absurdly disproportionate and takes our option to be free from banks away. It’s a terrible trade-off.
10k maximum means everything above 10k. 1 million is still above 10k.
Yes, it doesn’t affect asset donations, but just because it’s not a theft-ending law doesn’t make it useless.
While the limits are way too low imo, i agree that there is a need of sorts. Whoever i think any legislation like this should cone AFTER we have taken care of the major offenders. The order is just wrong.
It like allocating police resources to illegal lemonade stands while there is a mass murder running through town, killing someone every hour.
Criminals make most of their money from drugs. And most law enforcement resources are allocated to fighting drugs.
It’s our failed “war on drugs” that is creating a rich criminal class in society.
Legalize and regulate drugs, alcohol, prostitution and gambling and then there won’t be a huge criminal economy. What remains can then be easily squashed by law enforcement.
I wasn’t talking about war on drugs, those should be decriminalized anyway.
What I keep seeing in my personal life is car repair shops, medical professionals and other businesses that usually charge a lot and then take cash only. It’s obvious why.
Tax evasion is a thing, yes. But it’s also relatively easy to prosecute by auditing.
Money laundering requires a source of illegal money. And, what you may not realize, money laundering schemes always pay tax. They actually overpay taxes by faking non-existent economic activity in order to make the illegal money legal.
Take away the source of illegal money and money laundering disappears.
What I keep seeing in my personal life is car repair shops, medical professionals and other businesses that usually charge a lot and then take cash only.
Belgium solved that last year by simply forcing all traders to accept electronic payment (in addition to cash). They cannot refuse electronic payment.
No it’s not. The real money laundering is happening in the area of billions and we lose billions by companies not paying taxes. The normal people here don’t matter at all. 3k is tiny, that’s less than my gaming PC costs if I want to sell it used. Wtf
Ultra rich should be taxed up to their tits or ears but let’s not kid ourselves that 3k/10k EUR limit is going to affect anyone poor.
10k is the price of a used car so it affects almost everyone. And with inflation the limit will go even lower over time. Its a bad plan all around, and gives more power to states which are already too powerful.
Money laundering has the opposite effect that you think it does. Money laundering takes untaxed money and puts it through a process that results in tax revenue. The /absence/ of money laundering “robs” us, if it’s tax revenue that you have in mind.
The lazy AML enforcement style is what robs us, and it robs us of privacy, dignity, and autonomy. If they would enforce AML the same way they enforce other crimes (getting proper search warrants that respects our human rights when suspicion warrants it), AML would be enforced without collateral damage to law-abiding people.
Enforcement of tax evasion would be a petty cause to use as an excuse to force every single person in the land to patronize commercial banks. Like subjecting everyone to facial recognition and tracking just to make the work of a few shoplifters harder. It’s disproportionate and undermines our freedom because law enforcement wants their job to be easy. We lose our autonomy and options so law enforcement can have a bit of occupational convenience. Which amounts to nothing because criminals will simply tweak their operation.
Our boycott rights have been lost
We have just lost the option to boycott banks in Europe. Banks that:
- finance fossil fuels
- invest in private prisons
- donate to the campaigns of right-wing politicians
- snoop on us
- force us to register for mobile phone service
- force us to share our mobile number with them
- force us to supply an email address (then they use MS Outlook themselves so MS can see where we bank)
- force us to use their shitty dodgy closed-source smartphone apps
- and force distribution through Google Playstore so Google can also see where we bank
- block Tor users from their website (thus violating data minimisation principles when collecting IP addresses), then at the same time charge an unreasonable fee to offline customers blocked from their website who request paper statements
- discriminate against people on the basis of national origin
- lock us out of our money for frivilous reasons like:
- forgetting to give them an updated ID card copy the instant before it expires
- block us from donating to Wikileaks.
- set withdrawal limits in a protectionist tactic against runs on the bank
- subject us to negative interest rates
- deploy ATM machines that lie to us
We should have a right to decide whether to enter the private marketplace and patronise a business, especially a shitty industry like banking. We should have a right to boycott bad businesses. In the EU, that right has been lost. It’s a profoundly foolish trade to give up boycott rights so tax evaders have to work a little harder to dodge the auditors. Losing our right to boycott then has the consequence that banks can become even more enshitified because they need not earn our business. The banks can piss on us all they want if we are forced to lick their boots.
It’s a perversely stupid compromise of agency over our own lawful lives in order to make law enforcement a little more convenient and crime a little more inconvenient. To slightly give the cats a bit more advantage in the cat-mouse game at the cost of our liberties.
There are some parallels to the profoundly naive efforts to ban encryption or impose master keys. They want to make it slightly less convenient for criminals at the cost of our autonomy, dignity, and privacy. And they keep trying to push this shit. It’s not enough to push back once because it’s relentless. We must keep pushing back.
Well, most of the EU citizens (most of Western Europeans in fact) had that weird idea that they’d found the third way, where everything is regulated and a honest man has nothing to hide, but somehow this won’t be abused by mafia and big businesses and such.
They want to make it slightly less convenient for criminals at the cost of our autonomy, dignity, and privacy. And they keep trying to push this shit. It’s not enough to push back once because it’s relentless. We must keep pushing back.
No, they obviously want those autonomy, dignity and privacy themselves. This is the goal.
It’s a very slow and steady mafia takeover.
Seems like this is not an interesting topic to most of the voters. Based on the pirate party blog post this was already put in place mid march, way before the EU election days in june. Seems this did not leave an impact on most people, which will hardly ever handle that much cash anyway.
Will it be inflation adjusted?
If inflation continues (financial repression to reduce debt and mitigate the aging population makes that likely), that 3000€ will soon be 1500€ in today’s money and you won’t even be able to by a mid range laptop with cash in 10 years.
At the current official 2.5% inflation it’ll happen anyway after 28 years.
It’s basically a cash ban over the next decades. Great news in the current private surveillance economy.
Belgium, France, and Spain all have had cash limits of €3k, €3k, and €1k respectively for some time now. And the US has a variety of reporting triggers set at $10k. None of those limits have been inflation adjusted. So indeed more and more people become subject to unwarranted surveillance as time moves further beyond 1984.
But then consider Germany. Germans are wise enough to understand what they give up when giving up cash, so while the EU law has little effect on Belgium, France, & Spain, Germans are getting fucked by the EU on this and AFAIK there is no inflation adjustment at the EU level either.
It’s a shit law but if we must have it I would like to see it indexed to postage costs, which has been going up by leaps and bounds. The cost of printing a page at the library has gone from 5¢ to 10¢ in the past year… so that would be a good inflation index for this as well.
The medicines or sex toys I buy is nobody’s business.
Just let terrorists do the transactions so you can follow their cash flow. This is only hurting people who need to make some large down payment legitimately and now have to jump through hoops.
