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Comment by wtmt | Hacker News Reader

Many people wouldn’t see an issue until they’re either personally affected or are the kind to look at privacy and freedoms deeply.

The question for you is whether the government has a need or the right to know every penny (or whatever fractional currency you can legally use) that you move around. This shouldn’t be confused with the government having a need to know about incomes and/or wealth for taxation purposes. Sales or consumption taxes collected by sellers don’t typically care who exactly pays it or what the mode of payment is.

Trusting a nebulous entity like a government to track every expense and every money transfer would be draconian, and would be understandable only in dictatorships and authoritarian regimes (and the ones very close to becoming one).

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> The question for you is whether the government has a need or the right to know every penny (or whatever fractional currency you can legally use) that you move around.

First, there is nothing like the government in Europe.

Secondly, the organisms that are tracking as extensively as possible European citizen are mostly private firms (whose parent companies are typically not European). European directives like GPDR are on the contrary rather shielding European citizen privacy if anything.

I doubt this proposition is forcing to withdraw cash within euro zone. Citizen are free to continue to use cash or not at there discretion.

> First, there is nothing like the government in Europe.

technically no... but in practice, yes.

EU decides something, and local governments must implement the EU-wide changes into local laws.

If EU decides to do something, they do it... the states are not as sovereign as it might seem.

I mean... look at EU banning RT (dot com) - https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022...

EU decided to identify payers of bills (or bank transfers) above 1000eur, and every country had to pass the law ( https://www.eumonitor.eu/9353000/1/j4nvk6yhcbpeywk_j9vvik7m1... )

So yeah... EU is "the government", there's just one step in between.

>EU decides something, and local governments must implement the EU-wide changes into local laws.

The thing is, "EU decides" hides all the complexity of the reality. First of all, "Europe Union" can refer to many things. Here, most likely the sentence refers to the European Parliament. European Commission, European Council, euro area are three other distinct notions for example that can be easily confused with EU.

>the states are not as sovereign as it might seem.

They prioritize their sovereign decision power on staying unified above local punctual interests… or not, as the Brexit showed. States, so far, remain sovereign, even if they accept to bow before collegial decisions in which they themselves participate.

European Council is the institution that is generally presented as "the government".

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