The US government already has a legitimate way to stop air travel. And the government already has significant persuasive power; if the Secretary of the Treasury asked all the banks to stop electronic transactions for a legitimate reason, I'm sure they'd comply.

So what you're talking about is neither a legal government power or something where people would trust the government and follow along. You're looking for a way for the people in power to seize further power illegally when they think it appropriate. There's no "for good" there; that's just authoritarians undermining the rule of law.

> if the Secretary of the Treasury asked all the banks to stop electronic transactions for a legitimate reason, I'm sure they'd comply

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed a Bank Holiday...that shut down the banking system” in 1933 [1]. This is an old power pre-dating our current hyper-centralised banking system.

[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/epr/09v15n1/0907silb.htm...

Remember 9/11? Shutting down airspace in an emergency is easish: tell everyone to land.

There are very few cases where stopping a firm from functioning would be beneficial, as compared to it being destructive. Most of the time, we want flights, banking, credit cards, IT systems to function rather than go black; hackers have many more chances and time to disrupt all of these than a government will ever have occasions to consider halting a particular company's operations in the name of national security.

> Stopping electronic transactions in a financial emergency.

That means causing some people to starve. Literally.

I can't imagine how it would improve some situation. At best, if transactions are stopped for a short enough time, you will not make it much worse.

Our country adopted cards recently, I have a card and using it almost everywhere, but I'm always carrying some cash, 200-500 bucks just in the case that card won't work for some reason. It happens. If Visa would be down, I wouldn't be disrupted and nobody would be disrupted around here. Why don't you carry some cash around, it's still a legitimate payment method and it doesn't take much space in your wallet.

I like how easily you separate groups of men in "government" from groups of men in "corporations"