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DeSantis doesn’t like the Digital Dollar
His office tweeted this today:
The movement to establish a central bank digital currency is an attempt to surveil & control the finances of Americans. It would violate privacy, limit consumer choice & undermine market competitiveness. CBDC has no place in FL & we are proud to lead the fight against it.
The tweet had this graphic.
So what? some say. It’s all digital now anyways, who pays cash. This is different, and there’s absolutely no way it won’t be misused. You know exactly how it’ll go:
1. “Don’t worry, Cletus, you can still use your wadded-up dollar bills to buy your lottery tickets. If you like your cash, you can keep your cash.”
A few years and 247 WaPo / NYT editorials later:
2. “Actually, cash is bad, because criminals use it. Also, look how much more tax revenue we’d get with an all-digital currency, and that’s money that could be used for infrastructure and solving income inequality. Banks would prefer if you didn’t bother them with cash – it’s expensive, they have to hire tellers, buy machines to count it. So 20th century! So you have five years to trade it all in. P.S. Sorry, same thing with gold.”
Five years on:
3. “Enclosed is your monthly ESG expenditure statement, broken down by the professed identity (PI) of the business owners, compared with the percentages of each group in your city, in accordance with the Professed Identity Transaction Interaction Act of 2034. The information is provided for your own use and will not affect your credit score.”
And so on, and so on.
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This is exactly correct, and I applaud DeSantis for taking a stand — and for doing so the correctly stated reasons.
We are on the way to a social credit system already, with the buy-in of large financial institutions and big tech currency agents in this or that flavor of ESG. A Central Bank Digital Currency makes it trivially simple for the government to get in on that game, something it largely can not do today by virtue of its relatively small visibility into individual day-to-day transactions.
It can’t be stated strongly enough: Central Bank Digital Currencies are inimical to freedom, and should be strenuously opposed.
I appreciate DeSantis getting out in front of this.
Oddly enough I had a gentleman call me up and tell me about a very egregious case in which our MN state secretary denied him patent protection for something similar and he related to me very dire warnings about the dangers of abuse from a central bank digital currency which he thinks is close to happening. And judging by the establishments that accept checks and how many I’ve written in the past year, it’s not surprising that “cash is king” might be an antiquated phrase sooner or later.
Enthusiasts for a CBDC make sweeping statements about how “China is doing it” and “Europe is doing it” and “we can’t be left behind.” But they never present a plausible argument for the actual value of such a thing.
The closest I’ve heard is one wag on the Cryptonite podcast using the example of COVID support payments, pointing out that the government could have distributed payments to individuals much faster if everyone had a “digital wallet” into which the government could simply pour money.
Sit and ponder that for a few minutes.
What. Could. Possibly. Go. Wrong?
I agree. If cash goes away, we are no longer free. Simple as that.
I hope DeSantis gets somewhere with that, but it may already be too late. Just go to your local Home Depot and try to rent a flame thrower or grenade launcher (or the tools to make them) by paying cash.
So much for legal tender laws.
Cash is fine but useless online. Bitcoin is the answer.
Except no one accepts it, and no one will. Adoption is insignificant. It’s the Esperanto of money. You could almost say it’s a stalking horse for the digital dollar – hey, why go with that weird thing computer dorks use to buy jpgs of bored monkeys? This is a DOLLAR, and you know what that is, and it’s backed by the full faith and credit of the gummint. People who want to buy a pack of smokes or a movie ticket or a wok on Amazon don’t give a fig for the blockchain.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that’s a paradigm shift that’s not happening without a total collapse and repudiation of modern fiat currency – and even then you’d have a flight to tangibles, not a transplanting of faith into something that seemed just as incorporeal.
Gotta come out swinging against ESG, DEI and the digital dollar, at least.
Beyond that, most people who use Bitcoin don’t actually use Bitcoin. That is, they use a coin broker that manages their Bitcoin holdings for them. Because otherwise you risk losing all your Bitcoins when your hard disk dies, or when your girlfriend throws away your USB memory stick, etc.
I call this the myth of Bitcoin disintermediation.
Exactly, that’s why it’s awesome!
(Mi parolas Esperanton)
Of course you do.
I agree that pricing things in bitcoin instead of dollars is a paradigm shift that’s not likely to happen soon, but an app could easily convert between prices quoted in dollars and reconcile payment using a blockchain under the hood, much as some international online shops will let you see prices in dollars, pounds, euros, or whatever other currencies they accept.
The way things are trending it’s nearly inevitable that within a generation or two most people will buy nearly everything using their smartphones, whether online or IRL. They won’t carry cash, and they won’t own, let alone carry, credit cards.
The question is: who controls the payment network? I see 3 plausible alternatives:
The problem is that Bitcoin has been pitched as an investment, and most people use it as such. It’s a lousy investment, the price fluctuates wildly based on rampant speculation, and the idea that’s a valuable commodity due to artificial scarcity is dubious at best. Just as you shouldn’t keep your life savings in cash under your mattress, you shouldn’t keep it in Bitcoin on your hard drive, either. In fact you shouldn’t put your life savings in Bitcoin, period.
If Bitcoin is going to emerge as a genuinely useful technology (which I admit is still very much in doubt) it will be as a widely-accepted payment mechanism, not as an “investment.”
Not gonna happen
I know Glenn Beck can be over the top at times, but he was discussing CBDC yesterday, and he believes eventually it will be “programmable.” That means that they would know precisely how you spend your money, and could keep you from purchasing anything that they disapproved of. Is that really possible?
Ever been here? Visited it a few years ago.
I remember going into the library stacks in Med school to review articles from the 1960’s.
They all had a synopsis of the article in Esperanto.
My first reaction to what de Santis, @jameslileks, and @henryracette wrote, up through and including the above comment:
I am very impressed by the level of understanding of this issue by all three.
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About the Commenter
Mark Camp, BSEE Washington University 19xx or so, is a Christian husband, father, grandfather, and Second Bass who loves sailing, philosophy, physics, and bridge. In addition, he has spent most of his time over the past 15-20 years studying money and banking, and the underlying theory.
As a result of his dedicated study, Mark has become (by his own necessarily biased assessment) highly skilled in separating truth from fiction/BS on the public debates concerning the US Government’s proposal for Central Bank Digital Currency.
You can contact Mark by joining Ricochet.com and posting there, or by sending him a Private Message.
It most certainly is possible. Not only that but, I’d argue, probable. Once the CBDC exists it’s a coupl’a lines of code to enable prohibitions. It’ll start with something like “common sense gun control” … if you are a felon you won’t be able to spend your CBDC on a gun or ammunition.
It won’t be long before you’ll have things like …
Because of the likelihood of another J6 your CBDC won’t be able to used to buy a hotel room or parking within 1 mile of a Trump rally.
Because you are unvaccinated you won’t be able to use your CBDC to buy concert or theater tickets. Or ivermectin.
Because you are on Medicare or ObamaCare you won’t be able to buy cigarettes. Or “excessive amounts” of alcohol.
To limit your carbon footprint and combat the existential threat of climate change your CBDC won’t be able to used to purchase more than 20 gallons of gasoline per month. Or more than 5 pounds of red meat.
But use your imagination.
Ask a trucker in Canada how it works. Or someone in this country planning to use a Visa card to buy a gun.
you will own nothing and like it – Klaus Schawb
You’ll have nothing and you’ll like it. Or else you’ll have less nothing.
Just the other day I drove to Lowes to rent an M1A2 Abrams tank. I brought my trusty bag of $100 bills to pay. I couldn’t believe they wouldn’t accept my cash. Each bill had my picture on it and all that stuff.
Within a generation or two I hope to have weaned myself from my smartphone. Maybe even while I’m still alive.
I’m working on it now by forgetting it at home more and more often, and by avoiding MFA methods that require it.
That was a great one-liner, Joseph. I’m still laughing. I am a pretty smart guy. I’m so smart that I invested in all my bitcoin in 2021 early when it was still $70K per coin. The good news is I haven’t lost anything yet because I can’t afford to spend anything. It has been attempting a clawback of late. So there is that.
My my, someone thinks highly of himself.
Social credit score, subverting the constitution, surveillance, “enforcing the laws that haven’t been passed yet,” etc. as foretold by Frank Zappa in 1979…
https://youtu.be/ZeoEKsuf3W4
FZ’s politics could be incoherent at times and overly conspiratorial, but he was a staunch advocate of the free market, free speech and VERY anti-union.
I guess this is getting hot since we have seen one destructive act after another by these fools in the Biden Administration: my post on this from last year.
This is not just needed or convenient automation, this is for total control.
At the same time it allows for essentially complete control over each individual’s economic life, it enables the government to control a subject over which, if we are all free to act in our own self-interest, it cannot successfully lie to us: the economy.
We are right now in the midst of a great reveal in the American economy that is the equal of the great reveal Trump provided us for the governing political arena.
Every aspect of the Biden Administration is a failure. This coming election period is probably our last peaceful opportunity to salvage the American experiment .
When making online purchases one can obfuscate one’s identity to the vendor a/o big business.
Contact your credit card provider and tell them you are transitioning to another gender:”I now identify as Mad Geraldine.”
Many credit card companies will issue a secondary card on your account with the name of your new gender.
Of course the card will be linked to your original account info. The bank will know, and so will the government if they issue a search warrant. But at least the marketing companies will be misled.
No, where is it, Austria?
I don’t recommend Bitcoin as an investment, see comment #13.