Cryptocurrency: CBDC Digital Fiat WARNING BELLS GOING OFF

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Voters Hate CBDCs. Why Do Governments Keep Pushing Them?

Mises Institute @mises @profstonge
https://twitter.com/mises/status/1670813954396790784
https://mises.org/wire/voters-hate-cbdcs-why-do-governments-keep-pushing-them
Why do governments keep pushing CBDCs when voters hate them?
Simple: CBDCs are irresistible to governments, who would dearly love
to monitor and control every dollar you spend and every word you
speak.

https://mises.org/profile/peter-st-onge
https://stonge.substack.com/

Voters Hate CBDCs. Why Do Governments Keep Pushing Them?

Governments worldwide are trying to replace cash with CBDCs, and people
worldwide are starting to wake up, but we need a lot more.

A CBDC is a government-run crypto-token that replaces the national
currency with a tracking ledger—a list of who owns what—that lets
government surveil, control, and mandate every dollar you spend.

They could prevent you from buying the wrong thing, whether raw milk or
gas stoves, or self-defense. They could stop you from donating to the
wrong person, as we saw with the Canadian Truckers. They could even force
you to buy whatever a government bureaucrat tells you to.

On top of the Soviet-style surveillance state, a CBDC is an existential
threat to the banking system, to the US dollar and would give central
planners push-button control over every element of your life.

Popular Pushback against CBDCs

Last week, the right-leaning Austrian Freedom Party lodged a protest
against the current left-wing government ignoring a referendum on the
right to use cash after an overwhelming 530,000 Austrians signed a
referendum petition.

With CBDCs being pushed worldwide in the face of widespread public
opposition, I think we’ll see more clashes over protecting the
people’s right to save, and to spend, anonymously with cash—something
we’ve had for a long time and taken for granted but now under threat of
being seized into a CBDC, a giant balance sheet the government can surveil
and manipulate at will, turning your money into an allowance.

In fact, a recent poll found that Americans overwhelmingly reject a CBDC,
and opposition rises as they learn more about it. For example, opposition
doubles when people learn a CBDC can be used to freeze the bank accounts
of political protestors, it rises to even more when they learn a CBDC
allows governments to monitor your spending, and it rises to 74% when they
learn a CBDC lets government control your spending. Cholera polls better.

So why do governments keep pushing CBDCs when voters hate them? Simple:
CBDCs are irresistible to governments who would dearly love to monitor
and control every dollar you spend and every word you speak—think of the
opportunities for social engineering, reparations, or a China-style social
credit system.

Meanwhile, punishing political opponents with a CBDC means controlling
speech. This means permanent job security for politicians who serve the
deep state first with the people as an afterthought.

How Governments Use “Pilots” to Build CBDCs

The easiest to stop a CBDC is, of course, to make sure your government
doesn’t start one.

Unfortunately, central banks worldwide—8, at last count, starting with
China—are running CBDC "pilots," allegedly for research, that build
fully-functioning CBDCs without authorization. These should be stopped for
the same reason governments shouldn't be "piloting," say, tools to
mass-censor political speech. The people control the government, not the
other way around, and we tell them what they're allowed to "pilot.”

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By the way, central banks can run these pilots without authorization
because they're self-funding—they print their own budgets with their
basement money printers. Meaning in many countries, central banks do what
they like, free of the power of the purse that controls most of
government.

In fact, many central banks, including the Fed, are largely exempt from
Freedom of Information requirements where the government has to tell the
people what it's up to. As Murray Rothbard put it, the Fed has less
Congressional oversight—meaning less voter oversight—than the CIA.

This means central banks will do what they like until Congress very
specifically tells them not to do it—I mean spelled out like central
bankers are five-year-olds, including blanket CBDC bans even when they try
to sneak one in by running it through banks or contractors.

CBDC pushers are building them using central bank machinery that's immune
to voters. It's up to us to make our representatives stop them before
we're locked in a digital cage that none of us voted for.

Next Step after Pilots: Forcing People to Use the CBDC

Worldwide, so far there have been two major implementations of a CBDC.

The first was China, which has never met a totalitarian technology it
doesn't love.

The second was Nigeria.

In 2021 the Nigerian government pushed out its CBDC, the eNaira. Almost
nobody used it—uptake was about 0.5%, pretty rough in a population that
is among the most crypto-savvy in the world: over a third of Nigerians own
Bitcoin, and over half use crypto. So it's not the technology, Nigerians
just really hate CBDCs.

Given this pathetic showing, the Nigerian government turned to hardball.
First, they mandated discounts for paying in CBDC, then redesigned the
physical currency to flush out informal cash. Finally, they went nuclear,
limiting cash withdrawals from ATMs to $40 per day to force people into
the CBDC and achieve a "100% cashless economy."

Now, the informal cash-based economy in Nigeria is an enormous share of
output. It's life or death for Nigeria's 200 million people because it's
the only part outside government control, so it's also the only part of
Nigeria's economy that actually works.

Meaning, of course, that the cash limits led to complete chaos. People
couldn't buy groceries, stores couldn't stock shelves, gas stations ran
out of fuel in the largest oil-producing country in Africa. Nigeria was
rocked by widespread riots, including burning down banks and even central
bank branches.

By the way, the American-backed contractor who built Nigeria's CBDC, asked
about the cash limits and the riots they caused, praised the restrictions
as a "creative option" that he expects to happen in other countries that
impose CBDCs. Making Nigeria a cautionary tale.

What’s Next

As much as people worldwide hate CBDCs, governments worldwide love them:
Between the totalitarian surveillance and control, and the godlike central
planning of a CBDC, they will not stop until voters make them stop.

Some Republicans have been proactive on the CBDC threat: Senator Mike Lee
has introduced a Senate bill to ban all forms of CBDCs, while governors
like Ron DeSantis have moved to ban CBDCs in his state of Florida.

As for other countries, most voters still don’t grasp the threat CBDCs
represent to their financial freedom and human rights even as rogue
“pilots” spread like mushrooms. Time is running out to stop them.

[Originally published [42]stonge.substack.com.]

Author:

[43]Peter St. Onge

Peter St. Onge is a Mises Institute Associated Scholar and an Economic
Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.  For more content from Dr.
St. Onge, subscribe to his newsletter where he writes about [44]Austrian
economics and cryptocurrency.