9 ms·

They can't control the black market in drugs, what makes them think controlling a black market in cash, which is a million times more desirable, will be any mor

They can't control the black market in drugs, what makes them think controlling a black market in cash, which is a million times more desirable, will be any more successful? There's the small matter of millions of undocumented migrants entering Europe who will be trapped in this now-illegal-cash underclass, and these financial oppression laws just incentivise and create criminal networks to facilitate basic economy. This is financial oppression that totally demoralizes their society as a means to dissolve it. It's not a lot of money, and given inflation, diminishingly so. This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash and farmers everywhere have a lot of tax relief precisely because they provide food security for nations - and it's to the benefit of criminal networks to top it off. The architects of this policy are disgusting.

rantallion 3y ago
> There's the small matter of millions of undocumented migrants entering Europe who will be trapped in this now-illegal-cash underclass Are these migrants frequently making cash payments in excess of €3000?
- someplaceguy 3y ago
  If they want to pay rent or buy a car or any other thing of value, yes. Also, it doesn't matter whether it's frequent or not. "Let's ban migrants from buying cars because they don't buy them frequently" is not exactly the most convincing argument.
  - occamrazor 3y ago
    Unregistered migrants cannot buy a car at all, because they can’t register it and get a plate (details differ between countries, but legal residence is a requirement everywhere in the EU). Registered migrants can get a bank account.
  - Aaargh20318 3y ago
    Who the hell pays rent in cash? I doubt that’s even an option with any rental company except for shady / illegal slumlords, who will ignore this law anyway. Also, what kind of illegal immigrant rents a >€3000/month home?
    - someplaceguy 3y ago
      > Who the hell pays rent in cash? I doubt that’s even an option with any rental company except for shady / illegal slumlords, who will ignore this law anyway. It's not necessarily easy for migrants to open bank accounts. Sometimes it's even impossible. Even for me, I assure you that opening a bank account would not be easy (or maybe even possible) due to stricter requirements in recent years, even though I've never done anything illegal (to my knowledge) and I'm not a migrant. I know this because I've looked into many banks with the intention of opening an account and the requirements are all similar between them. This is in two different European countries. And well, for the past couple of days I've been trying to set up an automatic monthly bank transfer for my rent and my bank is not allowing me because it's "exceeding the daily allowable limit", even though it's way below the daily allowable limit that I've ran into multiple times for normal bank transfers. So there's that. > Also, what kind of illegal immigrant rents a >€3000/month home? Rents have gone up considerably in European capitals and consider that multiple immigrant families can live under the same (larger) roof. Inflation will also eat up these limits over time, as governments almost never increase cash limits according to inflation (even though they do it for many, many other things). Also, the limits are lower in some countries (500 EUR in Greece, 1000 EUR in Spain). I know for a fact that it's almost impossible to get a decent place in the center of Madrid for less than 1000 EUR nowadays.
ajmurmann 3y ago
It might not stop transactions for drugs, but it might make laundering the money harder and more necessary
- raincom 3y ago
  It makes money laundering harder for low and intermediate level drug dealers. Netherlands is a major importer for drugs: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Hamburg are major ports for drugs. Drug wholesalers in EU would rather transport millions of euros abroad, and use these euros in Africa in order to buy gold and other metals from locals. All of sudden, one ends with gold, sell gold back to refiners and get paid with bank transfers. It is a trade based money laundering. What the West want is to abolish cash everywhere across the world, it is an impossible goal. Even if Zimbabwe wants to abolish cash and use digital transactions, ordinary Zimbabweans don't want to participate in that.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    "It makes money laundering harder for low and intermediate level drug dealers." Can you explain why this alone isn't a win?
  - Guvante 3y ago
    You assume that making things hard for low and intermediate drug dealers is inconsequential. But drug wholesalers only exist thanks to low and intermediate drug dealers.
  - worksonmine 3y ago
    Many of them aren't even transporting the money thanks to the hawala network around the world. Where I'm from otherwise legit exchange offices have been caught doing this and acting as a sort of bank for criminals, holding millions in safes. Getting around the limitations of cash is no problem for those on the inside. Just like tax havens are only an option for the super wealthy who wouldn't really need them in the first place.
  - d136o 3y ago
    Ideally transactions denominated in Western coin align with western values (Good Things).
pjc50 3y ago
> roadside transactions are often done in cash You're paying 3000 Euro for eggs?
- HDMI_Cable 3y ago
  I think GP's intention was to mention the farmers themselves, who would (presumably, I'm neither a farmer nor European) receive above >€3000 in egg-revenue per week/month/annum, and then go deposit that at the bank, use it for mortgage payments, or pay for farm equipment et al. in cash.
  - consp 3y ago
    No self respecting company buying those goods would do cash transactions to a business in the Netherlands. All perishable goods are tightly regulated and cash payments make that harder to administer. Paying your various-shades-of-grey farmhands is another story.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    AFAICT it doesn't outlaw depositing >€3000 at the bank, it'll just be reported. And that's what farmers are annoyed at. If they don't deposit it, they can "forget" to report the income themselves, and cheat the tax man.
    - gunapologist99 3y ago
      This doesn't follow; then they could just spend it in increments of less than €3000.
      - bryanlarsen 3y ago
        But it's harder to spend.
  - JW_00000 3y ago
    This proposal does not forbid bank deposits of > €3000.
ilyt 3y ago
> They can't control the black market in drugs, what makes them think controlling a black market in cash, which is a million times more desirable, will be any more successful? Well, for one, they control cash production > It's not a lot of money, and given inflation, diminishingly so. This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash and farmers everywhere have a lot of tax relief precisely because they provide food security for nations - and it's to the benefit of criminal networks to top it off. The architects of this policy are disgusting. Do you have any actual example of that ? What transaction do small farmers need to do along roadside for thousands of eur ? As kid of small farmer I don't remember anything like that ever happening.
- HDMI_Cable 3y ago
  Right, but they don't control the distribution and transaction of cash. They may stop producing €500 notes—for example, but there is nothing they can do to stop these farmers or undocumented immigrants from bundling together >€3000 in smaller notes for use in paying rent, buying cars, or investments.
  - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
    []
    - input_sh 3y ago
      > if they find more than 3000 eur in one place that is not pre authorized, they will confiscate it all and punish the people who had that kind of cash; it's becoming 'the law' Can you please not make shit up to be obsessed about?
      - gunapologist99 3y ago
        No need to curse to make your point, especially since this is a burgeoning area of both criminal and civil law in western countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture#European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture#European_Unio...
shellfishgene 3y ago
There are for sure tradeoffs here, but in Germany for example they recently made paying in cash for real estate illegal because it was obvious that almost all those cash transactions involved crime money of some sort. Edit: As noted below cash here refers to paper money. The same law also prohibits real estate purchase with gold, silver, diamonds or crypto currencies.
- hiatus 3y ago
  So if you sell a house and want to buy a new one, you have to pay for a mortgage you don't need?
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    Does Germany have no equivalent to a money order?
  - birdman3131 3y ago
    Cash as in the physical object. Bank transfers are different.
  - bob88jg 3y ago
    No u have to do a bank transfer -in cash here means literally in cash...
  - kjandersen 3y ago
    Absolutely not, it simply means the payment must be done via the banking system. Electronic = mostly traceable.
  - doix 3y ago
    I believe in this case, cash refers to physical bills, not how it's normally used in conversation (at least in the UK) to mean buying without a mortgage (via bank transfer).
  - Guvante 3y ago
    Cash in this context means literal cash. Electronic transfers such as ACH would be allowed.
throwawaysleep 3y ago
How does this target farmers if the tax relief is legitimate? It isn't. The farmers just have a vastly inflated sense of self importance and consider paying taxes to be optional. Farmers are declaring their own tax relief.
elric 3y ago
> This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash Where (in NL) do you find farmers who routinely need to accept >3k in cash and are (somehow?) unable to accept electronic payments? Pretty much everyone everywhere can accept at least one form of electronic payments. That's a legal requirement for any business in Belgium, and I can't imagine the Dutch being that far behind on that ... Even if you can't take card or contactless payments or apps, you can do instant bank transfers with most banks within the EU ("Instant Payments"), either free of charge or pretty cheap. There's no excuse for being unable to accept non-cash money. There are, however, plenty of reasons to be unwilling, but that's another story.
- macinjosh 3y ago
  Why does the NL want to kick down at the farmers so badly? Don't they know where real food comes from?
  - ticviking 3y ago
    People who can independently produce food have a form of real power that is very hard to resist. The measures used to keep various peasant and serf classes under control were so extreme in history because if they became able to exercise that power the social order was overturned.
  - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
    Is the only way to buy "real food", to buy it in chunks of 3000+ EUR paper money? That sounds pretty expensive and a lot of "real food" for the average person. And if it is a business transaction sounds like a suspicious business transaction.
    - macinjosh 3y ago
      Wow megabrain. A farmer could easily sell a truck of produce for well more than 3k
  - piuantiderp 3y ago
lou1306 3y ago
> This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash. Most EU nations are setting up instant payment systems for these and other "informal" use cases. In Sweden you can buy strawberries at a sidewalk stall and pay through Swish [0]. I should also stress that, no matter how bad Swedish inflation is at the moment, it's very unlikely that you will ever spend >3k EUR (about 35k SEK) on strawberries :) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)
- airza 3y ago
  The EU system is going to be based on Ideal, which is the NL system already in place for instant payments.
Etheryte 3y ago
Have you ever been to the Netherlands? Many people don't even carry cash, never mind people buying goods from farmers. Card payments are so prevalent that some sellers at markets don't even accept cash.
pif 3y ago
[dead]
- piuantiderp 3y ago
  [flagged]
stev-0 3y ago
This law is intended to make large amounts of cash less useful without killing the utility of smaller amounts. If large amounts of cash become less useful that makes money laundering a lot harder. A black market for cash already exists. The people who buy it are called money launderers. If you want the convenience of a government backed currency you’ll need to do so digitally which makes fraud investigation a lot easier. Don’t like it? Bad luck. This is where every fair economy is heading.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Femolo 3y ago
Without a law you can't enforce it. The results will be known sooner or later.
oliwarner 3y ago
I disagree entirely. The problem with black markets is they function because the money they trade in has real world value. If you taint significant sums so they can't be used to buy assets (3k is a lot of money for a single transaction, thanks) you make it harder to benefit from crime. And I don't understand why you're explicitly defending tax evading smallholders. Because farms? Even smallholders can declare and deduct expenses. On your first point, some countries allow asylum seekers to work, and even if they don't, some tax systems allow them to declare income even if they're not really allowed to have any. I'm definitely in favour of making sure everyone works to the same rule, so everyone can live honestly. Cash-in-hand work has to die.

rantallion 3y ago

> There's the small matter of millions of undocumented migrants entering Europe who will be trapped in this now-illegal-cash underclass Are these migrants frequently making cash payments in excess of €3000?

someplaceguy 3y ago
If they want to pay rent or buy a car or any other thing of value, yes. Also, it doesn't matter whether it's frequent or not. "Let's ban migrants from buying cars because they don't buy them frequently" is not exactly the most convincing argument.
- occamrazor 3y ago
  Unregistered migrants cannot buy a car at all, because they can’t register it and get a plate (details differ between countries, but legal residence is a requirement everywhere in the EU). Registered migrants can get a bank account.
- Aaargh20318 3y ago
  Who the hell pays rent in cash? I doubt that’s even an option with any rental company except for shady / illegal slumlords, who will ignore this law anyway. Also, what kind of illegal immigrant rents a >€3000/month home?
  - someplaceguy 3y ago
    > Who the hell pays rent in cash? I doubt that’s even an option with any rental company except for shady / illegal slumlords, who will ignore this law anyway. It's not necessarily easy for migrants to open bank accounts. Sometimes it's even impossible. Even for me, I assure you that opening a bank account would not be easy (or maybe even possible) due to stricter requirements in recent years, even though I've never done anything illegal (to my knowledge) and I'm not a migrant. I know this because I've looked into many banks with the intention of opening an account and the requirements are all similar between them. This is in two different European countries. And well, for the past couple of days I've been trying to set up an automatic monthly bank transfer for my rent and my bank is not allowing me because it's "exceeding the daily allowable limit", even though it's way below the daily allowable limit that I've ran into multiple times for normal bank transfers. So there's that. > Also, what kind of illegal immigrant rents a >€3000/month home? Rents have gone up considerably in European capitals and consider that multiple immigrant families can live under the same (larger) roof. Inflation will also eat up these limits over time, as governments almost never increase cash limits according to inflation (even though they do it for many, many other things). Also, the limits are lower in some countries (500 EUR in Greece, 1000 EUR in Spain). I know for a fact that it's almost impossible to get a decent place in the center of Madrid for less than 1000 EUR nowadays.

ajmurmann 3y ago

It might not stop transactions for drugs, but it might make laundering the money harder and more necessary

raincom 3y ago
It makes money laundering harder for low and intermediate level drug dealers. Netherlands is a major importer for drugs: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Hamburg are major ports for drugs. Drug wholesalers in EU would rather transport millions of euros abroad, and use these euros in Africa in order to buy gold and other metals from locals. All of sudden, one ends with gold, sell gold back to refiners and get paid with bank transfers. It is a trade based money laundering. What the West want is to abolish cash everywhere across the world, it is an impossible goal. Even if Zimbabwe wants to abolish cash and use digital transactions, ordinary Zimbabweans don't want to participate in that.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  "It makes money laundering harder for low and intermediate level drug dealers." Can you explain why this alone isn't a win?
- Guvante 3y ago
  You assume that making things hard for low and intermediate drug dealers is inconsequential. But drug wholesalers only exist thanks to low and intermediate drug dealers.
- worksonmine 3y ago
  Many of them aren't even transporting the money thanks to the hawala network around the world. Where I'm from otherwise legit exchange offices have been caught doing this and acting as a sort of bank for criminals, holding millions in safes. Getting around the limitations of cash is no problem for those on the inside. Just like tax havens are only an option for the super wealthy who wouldn't really need them in the first place.
- d136o 3y ago
  Ideally transactions denominated in Western coin align with western values (Good Things).

pjc50 3y ago

> roadside transactions are often done in cash You're paying 3000 Euro for eggs?

HDMI_Cable 3y ago
I think GP's intention was to mention the farmers themselves, who would (presumably, I'm neither a farmer nor European) receive above >€3000 in egg-revenue per week/month/annum, and then go deposit that at the bank, use it for mortgage payments, or pay for farm equipment et al. in cash.
- consp 3y ago
  No self respecting company buying those goods would do cash transactions to a business in the Netherlands. All perishable goods are tightly regulated and cash payments make that harder to administer. Paying your various-shades-of-grey farmhands is another story.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  AFAICT it doesn't outlaw depositing >€3000 at the bank, it'll just be reported. And that's what farmers are annoyed at. If they don't deposit it, they can "forget" to report the income themselves, and cheat the tax man.
  - gunapologist99 3y ago
    This doesn't follow; then they could just spend it in increments of less than €3000.
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      But it's harder to spend.
- JW_00000 3y ago
  This proposal does not forbid bank deposits of > €3000.

ilyt 3y ago

> They can't control the black market in drugs, what makes them think controlling a black market in cash, which is a million times more desirable, will be any more successful? Well, for one, they control cash production > It's not a lot of money, and given inflation, diminishingly so. This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash and farmers everywhere have a lot of tax relief precisely because they provide food security for nations - and it's to the benefit of criminal networks to top it off. The architects of this policy are disgusting. Do you have any actual example of that ? What transaction do small farmers need to do along roadside for thousands of eur ? As kid of small farmer I don't remember anything like that ever happening.

HDMI_Cable 3y ago
Right, but they don't control the distribution and transaction of cash. They may stop producing €500 notes—for example, but there is nothing they can do to stop these farmers or undocumented immigrants from bundling together >€3000 in smaller notes for use in paying rent, buying cars, or investments.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  []
  - input_sh 3y ago
    > if they find more than 3000 eur in one place that is not pre authorized, they will confiscate it all and punish the people who had that kind of cash; it's becoming 'the law' Can you please not make shit up to be obsessed about?
    - gunapologist99 3y ago
      No need to curse to make your point, especially since this is a burgeoning area of both criminal and civil law in western countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture#European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture#European_Unio...

shellfishgene 3y ago

There are for sure tradeoffs here, but in Germany for example they recently made paying in cash for real estate illegal because it was obvious that almost all those cash transactions involved crime money of some sort. Edit: As noted below cash here refers to paper money. The same law also prohibits real estate purchase with gold, silver, diamonds or crypto currencies.

hiatus 3y ago
So if you sell a house and want to buy a new one, you have to pay for a mortgage you don't need?
- zdragnar 3y ago
  Does Germany have no equivalent to a money order?
- birdman3131 3y ago
  Cash as in the physical object. Bank transfers are different.
- bob88jg 3y ago
  No u have to do a bank transfer -in cash here means literally in cash...
- kjandersen 3y ago
  Absolutely not, it simply means the payment must be done via the banking system. Electronic = mostly traceable.
- doix 3y ago
  I believe in this case, cash refers to physical bills, not how it's normally used in conversation (at least in the UK) to mean buying without a mortgage (via bank transfer).
- Guvante 3y ago
  Cash in this context means literal cash. Electronic transfers such as ACH would be allowed.

throwawaysleep 3y ago

How does this target farmers if the tax relief is legitimate? It isn't. The farmers just have a vastly inflated sense of self importance and consider paying taxes to be optional. Farmers are declaring their own tax relief.

elric 3y ago

> This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash Where (in NL) do you find farmers who routinely need to accept >3k in cash and are (somehow?) unable to accept electronic payments? Pretty much everyone everywhere can accept at least one form of electronic payments. That's a legal requirement for any business in Belgium, and I can't imagine the Dutch being that far behind on that ... Even if you can't take card or contactless payments or apps, you can do instant bank transfers with most banks within the EU ("Instant Payments"), either free of charge or pretty cheap. There's no excuse for being unable to accept non-cash money. There are, however, plenty of reasons to be unwilling, but that's another story.

macinjosh 3y ago
Why does the NL want to kick down at the farmers so badly? Don't they know where real food comes from?
- ticviking 3y ago
  People who can independently produce food have a form of real power that is very hard to resist. The measures used to keep various peasant and serf classes under control were so extreme in history because if they became able to exercise that power the social order was overturned.
- ElectricalUnion 3y ago
  Is the only way to buy "real food", to buy it in chunks of 3000+ EUR paper money? That sounds pretty expensive and a lot of "real food" for the average person. And if it is a business transaction sounds like a suspicious business transaction.
  - macinjosh 3y ago
    Wow megabrain. A farmer could easily sell a truck of produce for well more than 3k
- piuantiderp 3y ago

lou1306 3y ago

> This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash. Most EU nations are setting up instant payment systems for these and other "informal" use cases. In Sweden you can buy strawberries at a sidewalk stall and pay through Swish [0]. I should also stress that, no matter how bad Swedish inflation is at the moment, it's very unlikely that you will ever spend >3k EUR (about 35k SEK) on strawberries :) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)

airza 3y ago
The EU system is going to be based on Ideal, which is the NL system already in place for instant payments.

Etheryte 3y ago

Have you ever been to the Netherlands? Many people don't even carry cash, never mind people buying goods from farmers. Card payments are so prevalent that some sellers at markets don't even accept cash.

pif 3y ago

[dead]

piuantiderp 3y ago
[flagged]

stev-0 3y ago

This law is intended to make large amounts of cash less useful without killing the utility of smaller amounts. If large amounts of cash become less useful that makes money laundering a lot harder. A black market for cash already exists. The people who buy it are called money launderers. If you want the convenience of a government backed currency you’ll need to do so digitally which makes fraud investigation a lot easier. Don’t like it? Bad luck. This is where every fair economy is heading.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Femolo 3y ago

Without a law you can't enforce it. The results will be known sooner or later.

oliwarner 3y ago

I disagree entirely. The problem with black markets is they function because the money they trade in has real world value. If you taint significant sums so they can't be used to buy assets (3k is a lot of money for a single transaction, thanks) you make it harder to benefit from crime. And I don't understand why you're explicitly defending tax evading smallholders. Because farms? Even smallholders can declare and deduct expenses. On your first point, some countries allow asylum seekers to work, and even if they don't, some tax systems allow them to declare income even if they're not really allowed to have any. I'm definitely in favour of making sure everyone works to the same rule, so everyone can live honestly. Cash-in-hand work has to die.