If you listen to administration officials, the key to winning the war on ISIS is to cut off the group's funding, some of which the government claims is tied up in stacks of U.S. dollars. At the same time, banking interests and policymakers claim possession of a $100 bill is practically evidence of criminality in and of itself. As these two efforts to stigmatize cash intersect, America faces a dramatic push to eliminate, or at the very least drastically curb, the existence of physical money.

Throughout the first 15 years of the global war on terror, there have been a lot of changes to our society in the name of war. But warnings about the effort to eliminate physical money within the United States still sounds like hyperbole. Not even the worst dictatorships in history eliminated money outright. Yet the intermittent talk of some future cash-less society is growing more intense, and high-profile officials like former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers are ever more comfortable in making public their disdain for paper money.