Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) will destroy liberty
We’ve been hearing a lot from both Republicans and Democrats about the need for a digital currency of some sort to save America’s collapsing economy from total destruction. But the simple truth of the matter is that our government wants to destroy the current economic system and replace it with a totalitarian monetary system that will destroy liberty by giving Big Brother full control over our economic lives.
Quite simply, government wants your money — all of it — and will do whatever it can get it, including the destruction of liberty via the creation of a digital currency (via John Whitehead):
Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power and control has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets and penalties.
No matter how much money the government pulls in, it’s never enough (case in point: the endless stopgap funding deals and constant ratcheting up of the debt ceiling), so the government has to keep introducing new plans to empower its agents to seize Americans’ bank accounts.
Make way for the digital dollar. Whether it’s the central bank digital currency favored by President Biden, or the cryptocurrency being hawked by former President Trump, the end result will still be a form of digital money that makes it easier to track, control and punish the citizenry. (Emphasis mine)
In July last year, the Federal Reserve launched “FedNow,” putting the wheels in motion for the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) capable of giving them and the government everything they need to control every penny earned and spent by every American.
According to the folks at the Federal Reserve, FedNow has nothing to do with digital currency; it was only created to allow bill payments, money transfers such as paychecks and disbursements from the government along with a host of other consumer activities move more rapidly and at lower cost. Unfortunately, this claim stands in direct opposition to the words of Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin, who explained that FedNow will create “a leading-edge payments system that is resilient, adaptive, and accessible.” (Emphasis mine)
What does “adaptive” mean? It means that FedNow lays the groundwork for a Central Bank Digital Currency (via International Business Times):
“The Fed will initially limit its CBDC to interbank transactions, but we should not be blind to the obvious danger that this is the first step in banning and seizing bitcoin as the Treasury did with gold 90 years ago in 1933. Watch as governments, which never let a good crisis go to waste, use Covid-19 and the banking crisis to usher in a new wave of CBDCs as a safe haven from germ-laden paper currencies or as protection against bank runs.”
“A CBDC tied to digital ID and social credit score will allow the government to freeze your assets or limit your spending to approved vendors if you fail to comply with arbitrary diktats, i.e. vaccine mandates.” (Emphasis mine)
As I reveal in my new book, The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty, a Central Bank Digital Currency will likely be connected to a social credit system like the one used in Communist China. Some of the areas tracked in real time by the CCP are (via New Horizons):
- Medical history
- Social media posts and internet search history
- Bank accounts and credit cards
- Residence, employment, and criminal history
- Relationships and religious activities
- Political activity
Earlier this year, I wrote about how CBDCs, ESG (environmental, social, governance) policies, and social credit scores like those used in Communist China would provide the trifecta of information needed by government to completely control our economic lives.
Big government can use CBDCs to routinely and covertly control how people spend their money because digital dollars are traceable, programmable, and can be “printed” at any time with rules and restrictions built into their design, literally putting every single cent of our money under government control to be spent (or not spent) as Big Brother sees fit.
A Central Bank Digital Currency will result in the complete loss of privacy and liberty, a fact confirmed by the heads of the United States Federal Reserve and European Central Bank (ECB) in a November 2022 meeting (via ReclaimTheNet.org):
During an appearance at a Banque de France (Bank of France) event, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, said if the US were to pursue a central bank digital currency (CBDC), it would be “identity verified” and “not anonymous.”
“We would be looking to balance privacy protection with identity verification, which…has to be done, of course, in today’s traditional banking system as well,” Powell added.
The President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, acknowledged that privacy was one of the main concerns Europeans had about the European Union’s (EU’s) proposed CBDC, the digital euro. Despite these concerns, she confirmed that “there would not be complete anonymity as there is with…bank notes” when using the digital euro. (Emphasis mine)
Big banks are already on board with the Federal Reserve’s CBDC plans as evidenced with the 2023 launch of “digital wallets.” (via ReclaimTheNet.org):
Big Banks in the US, including JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America are planning to launch a digital wallet to compete with PayPal and Apple Pay. The move, planned for the second half of this year, appears to be yet another push for a cashless society.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the new digital wallet will be managed by bank-owned Early Warning Services LLC (EWS), the company behind money transfer platform Zelle.
Contactless payments have been gradually becoming popular with the pandemic accelerating their adoption. However, governments and financial institutions have been pushing for contactless payments in recent years with the launch of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). (Emphasis mine)
Big government and big bank talking heads claim a digital currency will “liberate” people from the constraints of greedy bankers and governments, but what they don’t tell you is how the state can centrally harness your economic power and regulate it in ways that would mark the rise or strengthening of authoritarianism.
Every individual and business will lose their social and economic freedoms because digital dollars are traceable and programmable. What might this look like in the real world? A digital dollar could, for example, be crafted to restrict fossil-fuel use; it could also be used to enact de facto price controls (a goal of Kamala Harris) by preventing users from spending more than government thinks they should on particular products.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that a Central Bank Digital Currency will be used to create a surveillance state capable of giving big banks, the Federal Reserve, and big government unlimited control over you and your money.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He is the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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