Earlier quoted context omitted.
“You can’t buy a car without permission” sounds tyrannical to me.
Well there is no law forcing a salesperson to accept cash. So the permission here has little to do with the government. He is no more required to accept my bag of cash as payment than he is my vintage guitar. And while the value might be there, both are a massive hassle for the seller, so they’d simply refuse most likely.
Sometimes, the bank won’t accept your bag of cash.
One time I was in a bank branch sorting out some matter, and I overheard a conversation between the bank staff and another customer. The customer had a bag containing $100K in cash, and wanted to deposit it into their account. The bank staff were on the phone to the bank’s security office, asking for permission to accept it. They said their cash security policy limited how much cash they were allowed to have on premises at any time, accepting this deposit would put them over that limit, so they had to get approval to exceed it before they could do so. You could tell from the tone the staff used, they didn’t appreciate this customer’s behaviour
Another time, my wife went to the bank branch, because her grandfather had sent our son $50 cash for his birthday, and she wanted to put it in his bank account. She stood in line for ages, only to then be told “I’m sorry we can’t accept any more cash deposits, someone just made a big one and now we are at the limit of cash we are allowed to hold in the branch”. My wife objected it was only $50, but the bank staff said “sorry, rules are rules”. I told her in the future, one of us should just transfer the equivalent money into his bank account from our own, and then keep the cash for ourselves