[audunw]

> Sweden is one of the most cashless societies and they seem far from expressing authoritarian traits.

I believe this is because of a critical fact about scandinavian countries:

People trust the government, and by exchange, the government makes themselves trustworthy to the people.

It seems to me that people in the US has a deep distrust for the government. This may be because the government there is less trustworthy to start with, but I think it also goes the other way around. It creates an "us vs them" mentality which makes politicians and government workers have less respect for the people they serve.

I do agree with some of the points of the OP though. We shouldn't need some bank AND credit card company to stand between us and payments to other people and the government. Before we make the switch to cashless, we should have some kind of cryptocurrency. I don't care if it's created by the government, and that new currency is injected by them according to their monetary policy. I don't care if the government can see how much I have in that currency, as long as only they can. All I care about is being able to settle payments without being dependent on a bunch of private, opaque bank and payment companies, and their opaque infrastructure.

[squozzer]

You have a point but let me make a counter -- it's the subordinate who must prove their trustworthiness to the superior. Which in your view, seems to be the people and their government, respectively.

If you had said, "The government acts in a trustworthy manner, and the people, in turn, trust their government", then our viewpoints would be in alignment.