Austria’s Harald Mahrer: You Have The Right to Pay Cash

The idea that, one day, those little pieces of paper in your wallet known as cash may have about as much meaning as the folded-up papers containing old phone numbers or insurance information is a bizarre one, but one that may be coming nonetheless.

With more mobile payment systems coming out every day, and more stores taking them, some might wonder what the point of cash even is any more?

For Harald Mahrer, the Deputy Economy Minister for Austria, it’s vital…sufficiently vital that he came out with a seemingly bold pronouncement: Austrians should have a constitutional right to pay cash.

Mahrer noted that, when it comes to anonymity in payments, cash is the best way to get just that. Mahrer further noted: “We dont’ want someone to be able to track digitally what we buy, eat and drink, what books we read and what movies we watch. … We will fight everywhere against [anti-cash] rules.”

Naturally, in the United States, there’s no law either way; businesses are, as the Federal Reserve put it, “…free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law which says otherwise.”

This leaves regular users in a bit of a quandary, as while regulation may not make cash useless, it may instead be market forces, with businesses eager to push toward the market that means the most customers, and therefore, profit. Either way, however, cash becomes just as useless.

Perhaps Mahrer is going a bit too far on this one, but his heart is certainly in the right place. Certainly people should have as many options as possible when it comes to shopping, so as to accommodate those who want to carry out business privately.

While all this information is valuable to businesses—knowing what customers read, eat, drink, watch and everything else helps ensure that the business stocks what people want—some customers indeed would rather stay private.

A lack of cash, though, insulates businesses from potential theft; who would rob a business whose entire daily receipts were routed through a payment processor?

Still, a bit of protection for those old-fashioned cash-only types isn’t out of line here, if for no other reason than they may be a vanishing breed soon.