Should Cash Disappear?

In Sweden, some cafés no longer accept cash at all; they have gone completely cashless. In the United States, the share of payments made with paper money falls every year. Cards and phones are faster, cleaner, and easier to track. The question is no longer whether cash is shrinking, but whether we should let it disappear completely. My answer is no — and the reasons are practical, not nostalgic.

The case against cash is strong. Cash enables crime and tax cheating; it is expensive to print, transport, and guard; and digital payments create records that help everyone from shopkeepers to police — although every card payment also carries a small fee for the shop. Critics of my position are right about all of this. A modern economy will, and should, run mostly on digital money.

But 'mostly' is not 'only.' Millions of vulnerable Americans — the elderly, the poor, rural families with weak internet — still depend on cash for daily life. When storms knock out power and the outage lasts for days, as it did in Texas in 2021, cards become plastic rectangles and cash becomes the economy again. Privacy matters too: cash is the last payment that does not report where you were and what you bought.

A society that deletes cash deletes its own backup system. Keep the networks, improve them, enjoy them — but let the paper survive quietly in our wallets, for the day the screens go dark. Most revolutions in money are quiet ones; this one should stay incomplete.