Episode Details

Something a little different for you today.

I am speaking at the Battle of Ideas this weekend on three rather different matters:

* Immigration and Demographics

* Who Is the World’s Greatest Comic?

* Why Cash Keeps Us Free

Do come. You can get tickets here.

With this years Battle in mind, the Academy of Ideas asked me to write one of its Letters on Liberty. Here it is for your reading or listening pleasure. (There is a PDF version here).

It begins with this note from the Academy.

What are Letters on Liberty?

It’s not always easy to defend freedom. Public life may have been locked down recently, but it has been in bad health for some time.

Open debate has been suffocated by today’s censorious climate and there is little cultural support for freedom as a foundational value. What we need is rowdy, good-natured disagreement and people prepared to experiment with what freedom might mean today.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, but we shouldn’t be complacent. We can’t simply rely on the thinkers of the past to work out what liberty means today, and how to argue for it.

Drawing on the tradition of radical pamphlets from the seventeenth century onwards - designed to be argued over in the pub as much as parliament - Letters on Liberty promises to make you think twice. Each letter stakes a claim for how to forge a freer society in the here and now.

We hope that, armed with these Letters, you take on the challenge of fighting for liberty.

Academy of Ideas team

Why Cash Keeps Us Free by Dominic Frisby

Give most people the choice of living and working anywhere in the world, I bet the large majority would choose the US. For all its many shortcomings, it’s still the land of opportunity. It’s exciting, it’s dynamic. Wonderful things can happen there. In terms of tech, with Silicon Valley and all the ensuing social media and ecommerce, it is very much the world leader. And yet, Americans still use cheques.

When was the last time you used a cheque in Europe? Donkey’s years ago. As much as 5 per cent of all financial transactions in the US last year were by cheque. For all its modernity, the US is - in terms of fintech - a good 10 years behind Europe or Australia. Not only do they use cheques, but people in the US still go out with cash in their pockets. Bunch of luddites.

However, things are slowly changing, and the US is following the rest of the developed word to cashlessness. It is inevitable, I’m afraid. Technology is destiny.

It’s also a great shame.

Cash empowers its users

When I pay you in cash, nobody else gets in on the transaction - it’s a direct transfer from me to you. No grubby middlemen can cream off their percentage. No prying eyes of the state can monitor what we do. Big Tech can’t glean information from the exchange, to be used at some later stage to sell you stuff or, worse, report back to Big Brother, Big Insurance or whichever Big wants in on your data. Nobody can stop you making the transaction.

With cash, you can buy and sell and store your wealth outside of the financial system, if you so choose. There are plenty of reasons, both practical and moral, to do this.

Cash means control. Just take the recent de-bank