You have no substantiative rights without freedom to transact, and that is why cash is so important.

CBDC is just another authoritarian intrusion on freedoms, and anyone who supports that is complicit in destruction of fundamental, inalienable rights. If you just want to control others - then you could just say so, it's ok to be an authoritarian.

>A government bank could presumably provide financial services such as low-fee bank accounts and loans to people with bad credit scores.

Several countries already do that with a mandate for banks to bank everyone. The US banking system, including its regulation, is actually a decrepit legacy mothball of ancient cruft, significantly behind the rest of the world. It's just buoyed by the USD reserve status, and riding it into the ground.

>I can't just transmit my money into and out of a Spanish bank account in order to launder it.

Happens all the time. How do you think this happens, people move suitcases of cash? Banks launder money and get caught all the time, fined, and then immediately go back to laundering again.

>If foreign banks didn't comply with US law, they'd get in legal trouble and have assets seized, same as always.

like laundering money for the cartels, and getting away with a slap on the wrist, and then keep on doing it again, fined again for 10% of profits, launder again? This sort of legal trouble? or like single purpose banks in China, created with literally the singular purpose of routing around the US sanctions on Iran, that needed years of diplomatic pressure to close (and then re-open under a different name)?

The US isn't want it used to be. In the recent UA-RU situations, even some NATO countries refused to implement the US sanctions. Some Asian "allies" also refused outright, and some even went as far as to openly become a conduit for circumventing sanctions on Russia? the US a fading empire on decline that no longer has the weight it used to.

>Weird argument. If your problem is the phasing out of cash, criticize that. Except you can't, because nobody has proposed it and nobody wants to do it.

Why is the argument weird?

Limiting cash usage has been a de-facto official policy around the entire world for a couple of decades now, and intensified quite a bit recently:

1. Discussions in EU and UK on a total ban of cash so that negative rates can be implemented."Nobody proposed it"

2. SG, UK, EU, CA, JP phased out large denomination banknotes over last 2-3 decades. "Nobody wants to do it"

3. Many EU countries BAN payments in cash for transactions above trifling amounts, like 1000 EUR. "Nobody wants to do it"

4. US discourages cash usage via punitive regulations that have no other real objective than minimizing it's usage, I guess terrorists buy sandwiches with $20 bills, so we now have to watch out very carefully for such abhorrent acts of terror. Or switch to a card-only system, your choice. Such freedom, amazing, I already feel free just typing this. Oops, card declined, whats with your silly rights and all.

In case you need more than actual bans to believe cash crackdown isn't "nobody wants to do it, nobody has proposed it", what would you need, a personal call from Biden? Would the lowly Harvard Kennedy School of Government suffice? https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcb...

CBDC is just North Korea, but for the naive in the West.