That’s the headline over a Financial Times editorial calling on authorities to consider phasing out the use of cash — by everyone, not just governments. This is what it has come down to. The government has run down the value of the dollar to less than 2% of what it was worth when our parents were born. Now it is itching to ban the use of banknotes and gets an endorsement from, of all broadsheets, the “world business newspaper.” The FT refers to the banknotes as “another ‘barbarous relic,’” which, it says, is the “moniker Keynes gave to gold.”

Actually, it was to the gold standard that Keynes gave that moniker. He did so in his 1924 “Tract on Monetary Reform,” in which he wrote: “In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.” Added he: “All of us, from the Governor of the Bank of England downwards, are now primarily interested in preserving the stability of business, prices and employment, and are not likely, when the choice is forced on us, deliberately to sacrifice these to outworn dogma, which had its value once, of 3 pounds, 17 shillings, 10 1/2 pence per ounce.”

In any event, the FT is promoting the idea that cash is another barbarous relic at a time when our own government is moving to attack the use of even moderate amounts of cash in the most startling ways. This story is being covered by, among others, the Daily Signal, which is published by the Heritage Foundation. It has released a book on how civil asset forfeiture makes a mockery of property rights and, as Heritage puts it, “turns the police into profiteers.” The stories it has uncovered are heartbreaking.

The Financial Times is hoping to go way beyond civil asset forfeiture. It wants to protect government control of the economy as a matter of what it sees as principle “Already, by far the largest amount of money exists and is transacted in electronic form — as bank deposits and central bank reserves,” it notes, adding this FT classic sentence: “But even a little physical currency can cause a lot of distortion to the economic system.” It complains that the “existence of cash” limits “central banks’ ability to stimulate a depressed economy.”

How so? The pink broadsheet confesses that its “worry is that people will change their deposits for cash if a central bank moves rates into negative territory.” It seems to be hedging against the failure of the zero interest rate policy. It also complains that “unlike electronic money” cash “cannot be tracked.” It reckons cash “favors anonymous and often illicit activity” and exults that “its abolition would make life easier for a government set on squeezing the informal economy out of existence.”

The FT seems to endorse Kenneth Rogoff’s proposal, which it published, to abolish high denomination bank-notes. How convenient. A newspaper company wants to ban high denomination banknotes but permit the use of the small denomination banknotes against which it has been hawking its wares for more than a century. No doubt it’ll get to the small notes once its online pay-wall is able to pay for the newsgathering operation. It kvells that the Scandanivians are using cards “even for tiny transactions.”

Yet the FT backs away from a full ban on cash. Its brainstorm is to issue “dated banknotes” that would “see their value as legal tender gradually fall over time” — more than 98% if you use the Federal Reserve as your issuer and wait a century. The FT adds that banks could be “be charged for swapping electronic reserves for physical cash and vice versa.” The Financial Times concludes with this immortal sentence: “The benefits of cash are significant — but they need not be offered for free.” You may be able read it for yourself at any newsstand — for a small poke of gold dust, which is the moniker the Sun uses for money.