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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I think it's more to prevent you from sitting on a mountain of cash the government is unaware of. Generational money, laundering and the like. Forces you to admit to all your cash or lose it. It smells pretty evil and totalitarian to me.

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It's similar to the demonization in India in 2016 where the goal was to force people to declare their piles of black money. People don't always declare things correctly for tax purposes, and black money leads to other parallel economies (terrorism, trafficking, etc). In modern times it also encourages people to switch to digital payments rather than handling cash, something which makes tracing money easier in general.

It has little in common with the Indian situation, since the Bank of England will exchange these notes indefinitely. Other banks will usually also accept them (at least for their customers) for several years.

It's routine, it's happened to 13 notes since 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_England_%C2%A320_note

Note that it didn't end very well for India. The initial claims are conveniently forgotten and people just suffered. More than 99% of the currency got returned anyway, contradicting government's claims.

Note that I didn't comment on the outcome, only the intended purpose. I suggest reading the demonization wikipedia article for more examples if the India example doesn't satisfy you.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender#Demonetization

It smells pretty evil and totalitarian to me to force people to wait generations until they get to work again. Imagine if we just did away with the handwaving and just wrote "ownership of this bill turns another human into your debt slave for eternity until you spend it". Maybe then it would occur to people why there is e.g. inflation rate targeting.

Inflation hurts the poor the most, or is that what you are saying?

Inflation hurts people who are least able to negotiate wage increases the best, yes. This is why it tends to be bad for the less well off. It's great for professionals with mortgages; it also tends to be great for people with hereditary wealth, since that's often tied up in land and businesses.

However this has a lot more to do with the supply of oil and gas than the number of banknotes in circulation.

There are a lot of things that might be considered totalitarian about the UK, but this isn't one of them.

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