Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is a threat to freedom.
Its role is essentially centralised control and mass surveillance. For example, cash is largely anonymous. CBDC, meanwhile, will severely restrict personal choice.
As Catherine Austin Fitts notes, CBDC is a digital concentration camp.
Dangers of CBDC
CBDC grants central banks unprecedented insight into, and control over, transactions. Unlike physical cash, this kind of digital cash is fully programmable, meaning that central banks can identify parties involved in every transaction.
Which is obviously a violation of financial privacy.
CBDC can be programmed with specific conditions, limiting where, when, and by whom it can be spent, resulting in a system where cash is akin to state-issued tokens, like food stamps, but only spendable under government-defined conditions.
This will invariably lead to artificial societal behaviour.
With programmable money, central banks will certainly disincentivise saving by imposing negative interest rates or capping balances. This could prevent large-scale withdrawals from commercial banks, which could trigger credit crunches and economic downturns.
Furthermore, CBDC creates a technical and legal framework that allows central banks to directly confiscate private assets. This could be done for various reasons, including:
- reducing sovereign debt,
- controlling the money supply, or
- social credit score.
CBDC will also lead to automatic taxation on all transactions.
Think about this for a moment.
It would ensure tax collection on activities that might typically evade taxation, like small cash exchanges or yard sales.
Put another way, the goverment will have the ability to steal people’s income with even more ease.
