Why we should fear a cashless world

>>plausibly could you argue that India's real problem lies in government inefficiency and/or corruption?

Your are assuming corruption is an phenomenon that is generated in total isolation without other factors contributing to it.

Both government inefficiency and corruption have roots in lack of accountability.

Well, it's also a cost for private society:

Imagine you're an IT contractor that needs to bill international customers for your services. In Italy you have to pay very high taxes since being an independent worker you fall in the same category of those who can easily dodge taxes although you're not in exactly the same position: the government treats you as a thief by default and puts you up to a taxation level that makes sense only once that it's assumed that you will only declare about half of your revenue.

This is actually a big problem and has severe repercussions on the ability to spawn new businesses in Italy.

"Cash means total financial inclusion"

The author doesn't know what financial inclusion means. In fact financial inclusion has seen a boon thanks to cashless payments like m-pesa in Kenya. Thanks to not having to lug around cash and maintain expensive bank branches and offices, some of the poorest countries have made great strides in furthering financial inclusion.

People want to eliminate €500, not €5. But even if they eliminated all cash I doubt there would be a catastrophe of the type the article claims; people will use different implementations of the same technologies to find privacy and convenience. In fact wives married to alcoholics in Africa often prefer to store their money in cashless wallets and saving groups, because it is easier to hide from their husbands who might find the cash under the mattress.

Warm mixed asphalt roads should cost about $1M per mile. It's expensive, but it's not ludicrously expensive. If well done, in a warm environment, of low traffic, no truck levels, then you won't have to repave for upwards of a decade.

Source:

Maintenance a private road outside the USA. Labour is cheaper, however, everything else is more expensive so it balances out vs US numbers last time I checked.

Cashless societies are advanced as a solution to problems of moral decay. E.g., doing business under the table, not reporting taxes due to governments, or performing an illicit transaction. In many ways, advocacy of a cashless society is admittance that people are dishonest, and therefore all transactions should be made electronic. Instead of strengthening individual morality, workaround solutions are proposed -- like those trying to fix a morally bankrupt society via algorithmic systems that require no morality whatsoever.

So whether it be a government sponsored currency, perhaps a world currency, to stop bad behavior and bad actors; or a public blockchain (Anarcho-capitalism). We as a society are now faced with a moral decision centered around privacy and how much of it should be entrusted to governments. Notice how the thesis of cryptocurrencies is trust-less systems, because people / governments are assumed to be nefarious by default. That is a big nuance being ignored. Ultimately (IMO) this is an issue of morality. One which benefits from reading history, analogy, literary examples or anything for that matter. We are seeing a tug of war between citizenry and governments in the financial and cryptographic realms. This is relevant.

The financial system and notions of a cashless society foster a growing anti-government sentiment. It is obvious in this and other threads; a strong pushback against government, which all relate back to the Books mentioned. It is difficult to ignore the religious or moral contexts of this topic.

Especially peculiar when Bitcoin has already established a cult following, complete with a pseudo-church which evangelizes. Not to mention it was created by a supposedly anti-government (Satoshi) person "yet to be revealed". Is playful conjecture not fair discussion? You can clearly see companies are racing to research cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, and what same may argue as anti-government measures.

So, I think a real world subject -- is subject -- to everything of the real world. Like the written Words of The Bible and anything else that exists for good interpretation. When 2+ Billion people identify as Christian, and they (potentially) push back against cashless societies, it will become exceptionally relevant.