Biden Crypto Policy Portends Dollar Destruction, Liberty Erosion

The more we manage our lives digitally, the greater the power to surveil, control and abuse. Perhaps that's the point.

Biden Crypto Executive Order Portends Dollar Destruction, Liberty Erosion

If you like what the Biden administration has done to the paper dollar, then you'll love what it could do to a digital dollar.

The odds of that perilous prospect becoming reality increased exponentially on March 9, when the White House introduced its "Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets."

The order might not only foretell the further erosion of the world's reserve currency—and with it the wealth, economic dynamism and power that currency underpins—but the further erosion of our liberties.

It calls for mobilizing the federal bureaucracy to regulate digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, and to prepare for the creation of a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC) —an electronic dollar one might hold in a digital account with the Federal Reserve.

As I explain in a new piece at Newsweek, the two go hand in hand.

Should a CBDC supplant the paper dollar, the consequences could be dire. As I write in part:

The dollar is [rapidly] declining. The Biden regime has weaponized or supported the weaponization of the global banking architecture in pursuit of foes foreign and domestic, and is engaged in a War on Wrongthink that arguably mandates it. It is intent on imposing progressivism on Americans by way of its power and control over the U.S. economy.

…Consider how Communist China, the most powerful nation to introduce a CBDC, has used it. As The Wall Street Journal reported upon its piloting of the e-CNY, or "digital yuan," the currency:

is programmable. Beijing has tested expiration dates to encourage users to spend it quickly, for times when the economy needs a jump start.

It's also trackable, adding another tool to China's heavy state surveillance. The government deploys hundreds of millions of facial-recognition cameras to monitor its population, sometimes using them to levy fines for activities such as jaywalking. A digital currency would make it possible to both mete out and collect fines as soon as an infraction was detected.

Avik Roy writes that given the financial surveillance China's CBDC facilitates:

In combination with China's "social credit" system, the e-CNY will also enable China to directly send money to, and take money from, favored and disfavored individuals. People and businesses who speak out against the government can have their bank accounts instantly wiped out and find themselves de-platformed from economic life.

Given the aforementioned trendlines, would America's Ruling Class be able to resist the temptation to use a CBDC similarly to achieve its desired ends?

An American CBDC could allow the Fed to debase the currency effortlessly and at warp speed, while manipulating economic behavior as China's expiration mechanism suggests. That the Fed could digitally devalue money is treated by CBDC proponents as a feature of an American CBDC, rather than the most destructive kind of bug.

Take it from President Biden's failed first pick to head the office of the comptroller of the currency. As Roy reports, radical Saule Omarova published a paper in 2020 championing CBDCs, noting that they would allow the Fed to:

"fully replace—rather than compete with—private bank deposits" and to establish Fed control over "the very process of generation and allocation of financial resources...directly crediting and debiting the accounts of all participants in economic activity.

...Once the Fed has control of all Americans' savings and checking accounts, she writes, it will be able to "function as a hybrid of a sovereign wealth fund and a private equity firm," printing money to spend on infrastructure projects like high-speed rail.

The Omarova nomination tells you everything you need to know about the Biden administration's views on money and its essentiality to control.

As for civil liberties, one observer aptly described CBDCs as "a surveillance tool disguised as a payment mechanism." As in China, an American CBDC could enable authorities to hoover up information on all of our transactions—serving as the ultimate spying tool. Who is to say authorities wouldn't take the next step and freeze or seize accounts of political undesirables—Wrongthinkers recast as domestic enemies?

In recent years, the leaders of public- and private-sector power centers have weaponized their institutions against perceived foes. They have engaged in substantial pandemic power-grabs. They have undertaken wide-ranging efforts to enforce compliance with Ruling Class orthodoxy. With our betters already arguably implementing a budding American social credit system aimed at subjugating and controlling dissenters, why would we expect anything other than for a CBDC to become an integral part of it?

Read the whole thing here.