The Problem

It is becoming increasingly obvious that there is a coordinated push to get nations to adopt centralised digital currencies in the form of CBDCs. To many, this push appears insidious — and for good reason. It introduces serious privacy and freedom concerns, particularly when coupled with financial surveillance, digital IDs, and age verification legislation being advanced simultaneously across multiple jurisdictions.

The intention is clear: to expand state-level surveillance over financial transactions and introduce greater social control through programmable money — including the ability to simply freeze access to funds. This power has already been used to squash resistance and punish dissidence around the world. The Canadian trucker convoy, Nigerian protesters, and countless individuals who have found themselves suddenly “unbanked” for holding the wrong opinions serve as warnings of what is to come.

CBDCs are not merely digital versions of existing currency. They are surveillance infrastructure masquerading as monetary innovation. Every transaction logged. Every purchase tracked. Every unapproved expenditure potentially blocked.

Many freedom-minded individuals and organisations, including those normally suspicious of state overreach, are seeking to expose and oppose this process while also looking for real-world solutions.

The Natural Reaction

By default, the old saying “cash is king” seems obvious and natural to those with genuine concerns. So too does buying gold and silver to protect wealth and privacy — an attempt to exit the system entirely.

This reaction is understandable. Cash is physical, private at the point of transaction, carries no transaction fees, is largely peer to peer, and operates outside the expanding digital surveillance apparatus. It feels like freedom. It feels like an escape route.

Governments themselves appear to recognise this. In Ireland, legislation has been proposed to mandate that banks maintain ATMs in every town and that businesses accept cash. Similar discussions are happening across Europe. The presumption is that mandating cash acceptance preserves an escape route from programmable money and centralised control.

Even states, it seems, are taking cash seriously as an alternative to the digital panopticon they are simultaneously constructing.

The Problem with the Presumed Solution

While it is natural and right to oppose potentially authoritarian, dystopian infrastructure, the obvious answer may not be the right one.

Yes, cash is better than a CBDC. But it is still a state-level control mechanism.

Consider what cash actually is. The state retains a monopoly on its supply. It controls inflation through debasement — the quiet theft of purchasing power through the printing press and credit expansion. The currency is debt-backed, which is the very reason for taxation: offsetting the deficit created by spending money into existence. Cash does not free you from the state’s monetary system. It is the state’s monetary system — just an older, less surveilled version of it.

And here lies the deeper problem with cash mandates: they do not challenge state control over money. They extend it.

When freedom-minded people petition the state to force businesses to accept cash, they are granting the state authority over payment methods in order to resist the state’s authority over payment methods. The contradiction should be obvious.

You cannot be pro-freedom while petitioning the state to impose more rules in your favour. The problem isn’t that businesses are permitted to refuse cash. The problem is the state’s monopoly on money itself.

Legal Tender: The Chain Already Around Your Neck

Most jurisdictions already have legal tender laws compelling acceptance of state fiat for debt settlement. These laws are not neutral.

Murray Rothbard understood this clearly. In What Has Government Done to Our Money?, he explains how legal tender laws function as a mechanism of control:

“How was the government able to enforce its price controls on monetary exchange rates? By a device known as legal tender laws… If the government sticks to the original money, its legal tender law is superfluous and unnecessary.”

The implication is stark: legal tender laws exist precisely to force acceptance of currency the state has debased. If the money were sound, no law would be needed — people would accept it willingly.

Legal tender laws are not protections. They are compulsions. They lock us into a monetary system we find difficult to escape — by decree.

Extending such mandates to every retail transaction doesn’t protect freedom. It compounds the existing coercion. Why expand a system of monetary control that we claim to oppose?

The State’s Monopoly on Money

The real issue is not which form of state currency businesses must accept. The issue is that the state claims a monopoly on currency at all.

Friedrich Hayek made this argument forcefully in Denationalisation of Money (1976). He argued that what is dangerous “is not the right of governments to issue money but their exclusive right to do so and their power to force people to use it and to accept it at a particular price.” His conclusion was unequivocal: legal tender laws should be repealed entirely.

Hayek understood that governments had preserved their monopolies over money for over two thousand years through coercion and by spreading the fiction that coining and printing money was a central prerogative of the state. This monopoly, he argued, had “short-circuited the natural evolutionary path of the development of money” — preventing the spontaneous emergence of sound currency through voluntary exchange.

Cash mandates do the opposite of what Hayek prescribed. They expand the state’s monetary monopoly by forcing participation in the system. The state still decides what counts as “legal” money, still sets its value, still controls the supply. Mandating cash acceptance reinforces this arrangement.

Two centuries before Hayek, the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say understood this principle: “Custom, therefore, and not the mandate of authority, designates the specific product that shall pass exclusively as money.” Money should emerge from voluntary exchange, not government decree.

The Seen and the Unseen

Frédéric Bastiat, another of the great French liberal economists, built his work around exposing the hidden consequences of government intervention. He warned that “the state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”

Bastiat argued that governmental coercion is only legitimate if it serves “to guarantee security of person, liberty, and property rights, to cause justice to reign over all.” Forcing businesses to accept a particular form of payment — even cash — exceeds this mandate. It transforms the state from a protector of voluntary exchange into its regulator.

Those who advocate cash mandates see the immediate benefit: preserved access to physical currency. What they do not see is the precedent established — that the state has the authority to dictate the terms of private exchange. Once that authority is granted, it will not be confined to purposes you approve of.

Today the state mandates cash acceptance. Tomorrow it mandates digital ID verification for cash withdrawals. The tool you handed it becomes the instrument of your control.

Freedom of Association Works Both Ways

Property rights and freedom of association include the right to set the terms of trade. If a business doesn’t want to handle cash for security, efficiency, or any other reason, forcing them to do so is coercion. If customers object to cashless policies, they have the freedom to patronise competitors.

The right to refuse service — including refusing certain payment methods — is fundamental to voluntary exchange. You cannot defend freedom by violating it. The means must match the ends.

When we ask the state to override these decisions, we’re not protecting freedom. We’re empowering the state to micromanage private commerce — the very thing we claim to oppose.

The True Solution: Separation of Money and State

If the state’s monopoly on money is the problem, then the solution is not to mandate one form of state money over another. The solution is the separation of money and state.

This is not a radical proposition. It follows the same logic as the separation of church and state — a principle that took centuries to establish but which we now recognise as foundational to liberty. The state has no more business controlling money than it has controlling religion.

The goal is not to reform state money. The goal is to exit it.

Agorism: The Market as Resistance

The practical mechanism for this exit is agorism — the use of peaceful market activity to withdraw consent and starve the state of resources and legitimacy.

Every transaction conducted outside the state’s monetary system is an act of resistance. Every exchange in sound money, precious metals, cryptocurrency, or barter weakens the state’s grip on economic life. The market becomes the battleground, and voluntary exchange becomes the weapon.

This is not about waiting for political permission. It is about building parallel systems that make state money irrelevant. The state cannot surveil what it cannot see. It cannot tax what it cannot track. It cannot control what it cannot access.

What Sound Money Looks Like

If we are to exit the state’s monetary system, we need something to exit into. Gold and silver have served this purpose for millennia. They are sound in that their supply cannot be arbitrarily inflated. They are private. They are tangible.

But gold and silver have limitations. They are difficult to divide for small transactions. They are heavy and inconvenient to transport. They require trust in purity and weight. For large-scale, efficient exchange in a modern economy, they are cumbersome.

Barter suffers similar limitations. It requires a double coincidence of wants and does not scale.

What is needed is money that combines the soundness of precious metals with the efficiency of digital exchange — while remaining outside state control and preserving privacy.

Such money now exists.

Cryptocurrencies designed for privacy and fungibility — Monero being the most advanced current example — offer precisely these properties. Fixed or predictable supply. No central authority. Private by default. Peer to peer. No permission required.

This is not a sales pitch for any particular project. It is a recognition that the technology now exists to achieve what Hayek could only theorise about in 1976: privately issued, competing currencies that emerge from voluntary adoption rather than state decree.

The limitations are real. Adoption is limited. Convenience is not yet comparable to state currency. These are the same challenges faced by any new money. The difference is that digital private money can scale in ways physical commodities cannot.

The Market Will Decide

Consumer advocacy groups encourage people to boycott cashless businesses and support those that accept cash. This is exactly how monetary preferences should be expressed — through voluntary choices, not legislative mandates.

If enough people want cash, businesses that accept cash will have a competitive advantage. If enough people want private digital money, businesses that accept it will thrive. The market provides a feedback mechanism far more effective and far less coercive than legislation.

The answer is not to mandate what forms of payment businesses must accept. The answer is to build, adopt, and use alternatives until the state’s money becomes just one option among many — and eventually, the inferior one.

An Appeal to the Freedom-Minded

I understand the desire to default to cash. It feels safe. It feels familiar. It feels like resistance.

But cash is not safe. It is the state’s money, subject to the state’s inflation, controlled by the state’s laws. Your wealth held in cash drains away silently through debasement. Your “escape route” leads back into the same system you are trying to flee.

The instinct is right. The execution is wrong.

Do not ask the state to protect you from the state. Do not petition your rulers for kinder chains. The state created this problem. It will not provide the solution.

The Real Fight

The separation of money and state is a mammoth task — as significant as the separation of church and state, and likely to take as long. But it begins with a simple recognition: the state has no legitimate claim to monopoly over the medium of exchange.

Every time we ask the state to solve a problem the state created, we strengthen the chains we claim to oppose. The answer to state-controlled digital money is not state-mandated physical money. The answer is to build, use, and protect alternatives that exist outside the state’s reach entirely.

Cash is not king. Freedom is. And freedom cannot be mandated. It must be built.