When I received my first meager salary as a journalist almost 20 years ago, I received money in an envelope. I was very proud of the paper on which the cashier wrote my name beautifully, as if it was my first signature in a printed newspaper. At least now I had money for cigarettes.

About a year later, the next edition I went to, I got a card and the salary started going into my bank account instead of in an envelope. On payday, I wanted to feel alive. I would go to the ATM and take all the money in cash. I was more afraid of the bank and “hackers” than emotions on the street with money in my pocket. They were few enough not to cause me such problems. But that’s how I felt it was my money. Now, these days, I also pay for a tomato with a 1 lei card in a store.

If you follow the chorus of furious reactions against the decision that, starting this month, cash payments and transactions will be further restricted, you would say that many Romanians are left 20 years ago, nostalgic for the day of the teller and ignorantly afraid of banks. A penny is yours if it is in your hands. Especially when it’s small.

Of course, in reality the reasons are mostly different, less romantic or irrational than the Facebook debacle, where most of them seem to have been born yesterday, when, you know, cash payments were still limited by law, only at higher ceilings. Then our cash Romanians no longer felt such an unconstitutional chain and mockery of their rights. Perhaps because the ceiling of 5,000 lei was quite a distant threat from the poverty of their monthly lives. While a thousand lei, we also know what it looks like.

Why should we love cash? We don’t prosecute guys who live off of outright crime, or knights in aluminum helmets for whom banks are Satan. In their world, “cash is king” and they will stay there.

But, probably, many of us remember a colleague who wants a salary in hand, and an aunt who asks for cash when she collects at the cash register, because they have arrests from ANAF on their accounts and they do not want to pay. Maybe I heard from an uncle who sells only cash at the bazaar or fair, that the poor “producer” doesn’t have a company. We’ve all experienced those supernatural phenomena that affect entire nightlife districts of big cities and suddenly leave no signal or fail POS in restaurants and clubs.

All these cash lovers are running away from cards and banks for one reason. Not because it makes them feel free and independent. But somehow cheat the state and leave more money in your pocket. Or to avoid paying taxes, or to avoid some sanctions.

I laughed a little nauseously at the demagoguery of the TV commentator who said that Romanians do not evade taxes, sir, they like to pay taxes, but only when they understand their purpose. Only the Romanian state is an idiot. And yet the little demagogue was half right.

No, no one prefers to have less money in their pocket, especially when it doesn’t allow them to live decently from the start. Also, many Romanians who don’t live in the urban rich educated bubble of the respective commentator like to skirt the rules, and we can see it from the way they drive down the streets, to the way some people stand in front of any line. But yes, even more Romanians believe that the state is a thug who just wants to get rid of you.

why Here we get to the heart of most of the problems facing Romania. When you have a government with an unreliable government that is constantly wrong about the measures they take, that doesn’t know how to transparently explain their measures, and that ignores or outright abuses the citizens they are supposed to work for, why give him even more money ? Spend them on ill-conceived projects or steal them through corrupt combinations? The spirit of robbery is growing.

Read the article on Panorama.ro