for businesses with slim margins, card and processing fees above whole percentage points are basically a private tax. the problem with cashlessness (and over-re

for businesses with slim margins, card and processing fees above whole percentage points are basically a private tax. the problem with cashlessness (and over-regulation and surveillance in general) is it mainly punishes normal people for a lack of enthusiasm in their compliance while ignoring (therefore rewarding) the total scofflaws. the economic and cultural effects of this are negative for everyone outside the funded or socialized sector. the loss of legit businesses has come up in backyard conversations for years about how many of the neighbourhood retail storefront businesses are just money laundering fronts. it drives up rents for legit businesses, discourages entrepreneurialism, and turns highstreets into homogenous globalized airport strip malls without local character. the dominance of laundering and other criminal activity is the direct effect of over regulation that sets high compliance bars for any new business, and so entrepreneurs (mainly 1st gen immigrants) switch away from the legit economy into grey and black markets to survive, while legit ones are forced out. black markets need prohibition and arbitrary regulation to exist, and all of canada's regulatory nonsense is exclusively creating conditions for those markets. the cities are starting to resemble 3rd world economies where political parties fund themselves through kickbacks from tolerating the black markets created by their own absurd policies, while preying on anyone trying to make their own way. the solution is to roll back the regulatory culture to let new legit businesses have their natural advantage on criminal ones. any further moves toward cashlessness only empower the black market.