In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

This isn't a US-specific problem, a lot of Europe and the Anglophone world at large is experiencing issues like this. It feels like the last two years especially (but a fair bit leading up to it) have utterly destroyed my trust in not just the political institutions in the UK but a lot of other ones I'd taken for granted in the past too. I genuinely feel like we've become perhaps not a banana republic but certainly a banana kingdom where corruption is the norm and the government exists primarily to serve the powerful rather than the people. We're literally at the point where the Prime Minister can openly flout the law and lie about it to the Mother of Parliaments without consequence, where there's apparently no meritocracy whatsoever in how politicians are appointed to high office, and policy positions are in lockstep with predicted media response rather than any notion of public good. The tail has wagged the dog right into oncoming traffic.

All governments will use (or abuse) the powers they have to the absolute maximum extent they can get away with which is why subsidiarity is so important. The less power any individual has, the less damage they can do by using it as a tool for their own self-interest and the more they're forced to build consensus with other influential people which limits extremism. If it were up to me I'd abolish the office of Prime Minister altogether in favour of strong Cabinet collective responsibility and I'd also create an anti-corruption body completely outside of Parliament and the other institutions of state with wide-ranging powers to seek and punish misconduct in high office. Political office is an absolute magnet for people with unpleasant personality traits, instead of assuming good faith in politicians we need to assume bad faith and build the machinery of government defensively to accomodate this.

Another remedy to our issues is abolishing general elections in favour of rotating, asynchronous by-elections. This would give us exactly the same amount of democracy, but it means that the media's influence is massively reduced due to a lack of national election campaigns and it also means parties are forced to stick to their manifestos as they're effectively forced to campaign locally at all times so pulling a Nick Clegg becomes much more risky. As well as preventing the election result essentially being a function of how good the media strategy is, it also means the makeup of Parliament changes much more gradually which allows for long-term planning instead of the insane pendulum swinging where nothing gets done if it takes more than five years.

Cash is just the physical representation of a fiat currency. Fiat currencies exist independently of cash.

As long as you can pay your taxes somehow with cash, I fail to see the problem? The tax office doesn't need to accept cash directly. I don't really see the problem if they delegate handling cash to banks or other institutions as long as no one can be denied access to those.

I mistakenly used the french acronym, sorry for the confusion

Excuse me for my pessimism but a short while ago I was reading and digging deep about the infamous Gulag-system in the Soviet Union roughly from 1920-1960. And after endless unimaginable suffering, excess of violence which just roamed free in those "zones" spanning over decades after it fizzled out when Stalin finally died - some little insight about human nature dawned upon me after striding through untold personal accounts: Those things begin and also end.

So, yeah it roughly began in 2001 with the attack on civil liberties (Patriot-Act) and it will continue as there is no real opposition to it, the vast majority simply don't care, and after 30-40 years, one or two generations it will end.

[0]The prospect of arrest and trial weighed heavy even on the highest-ranking Party member. Following their arrest, aware of the fate that awaited them, many immediately asked to sign their ‘confession’. Others, unable to comprehend what was happening, remained loyal to the Party, believing that it would eventually realise its mistake and reinstate them. ‘They were all tired men. The higher you got in the hierarchy, the more tired they were. I have nowhere seen such exhausted men as among the higher strata of Soviet politicians, among the Old Bolshevik guard. It was not only the effect of overwork, nervous strain and apprehension. It was the past that was telling on them, the years of conspiracy, prison and exile; the years of the famine and the Civil War; and sticking to the rules of a game that demanded that at every moment a man’s whole life should be at stake. They were indeed ‘dead men on furlough’, as Lenin had called them. Nothing could frighten them any more, nothing surprise them. They had given all they had. History had squeezed them out to the last drop, had burnt them out to the last spiritual calorie; yet they were still glowing in cold devotion, like phosphorescent corpses.’ Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue, 1945, (quoted by: Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, 1990).

[0]https://archive.org/details/danzig-baldaev-drawings-from-the...

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Anything that can be abused, will be abused. This is not cynical, this is just how it is. Progress is great, but cashless is not progress.