When the State Becomes Your Banker
Here is a social media post from the White House, i.e., from the nominal leadership group of the entire free world:
A “digital dollar” may seem far-fetched, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Today, the Biden-Harris Administration published policy objectives and a technical analysis for a potential U.S. central bank digital currency: https://t.co/VrwSs7hpNS
— White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (@WHOSTP) September 16, 2022
The Biden-Harris Administration has officially announced itself, and hence the United States Federal Government as a whole, to be firmly on the road towards establishing a digital money system to be controlled by the United States Federal Reserve.
First of all, these “policy objectives” indicate to this observer that the leaders of the “free world” are green with envy over China’s social morality score algorithm, whereby the Chinese Communist Party has established the authority to cut off any Chinese citizen’s access to his bank account if and when the Party deems that citizen to be “immoral,” aka not a sufficiently compliant slave. The ease with which such powers could be wielded over people’s heads, and deployed on a moment’s notice, if the entire economy were run through a digitized money supply under central bank control, is as obvious as it ought to be terrifying to the innocent of spirit. (It does not terrify me only because I have seen it coming for years, and have long since accepted that we are all slaves anyway, so why should I be frightened of losing what I have known for some time was already completely illusory?)
Secondly, anyone who does not think that the government analysts and policy wonks brainstorming these objectives are aware of, and titillated by, the prospect of total social control entailed by centralized, flick-of-a-switch ownership of the money supply, is not merely innocent, but dangerously oblivious to the nature of the human heart.
Thirdly, anyone who thinks such power granted to the Federal Reserve could be wielded for good is clearly lost in the enthusiasm of tribal identification, and would immediately be divested of his foolishness were these Biden-Harris “policy objectives” being proposed by, say, a second Trump administration.
Finally, no such monetary system would be established in one country alone. Already, other countries with less liberal traditions than the U.S. are well on their way to making all financial transactions (and their implications, such as personal habits, places frequented, life preferences, and so on) part of one’s official government record, by means of direct, automatic reporting of every digital transaction to the national tax service. It is not only not “far-fetched,” but indeed it is not far off, that we will all be living in a cash-free universe, where exchange by way of legal tender will be impossible anywhere in the civilized world except by means of digitized money — plastic cards and smartphones today, retinal scans or brain chips tomorrow. The explicit centralization process, already well underway in China and not far behind in other countries, only simplifies and clarifies the ultimate meaning of these developments.
Government-controlled schooling means state regulation of how you think. Government-controlled healthcare means state determination of your options for self-preservation, and ultimately the social value of your life. Government-controlled transactions — which is what a fully digitized and centralized money supply would entail — means your practical ability to provide for your own basic needs is under the direct and omnipresent monitoring, and the arbitrary and politically motivated control, of the state. The government effectively becomes your sole bank, and all your money is permanently and irrevocably in that bank. Private transactions, in the strict sense, will no longer exist. Yet another of the central recommendations of The Communist Manifesto comes into fruition, all dolled up for today’s smartphone-addicted, government-school-retarded masses.
It will be so convenient, however, and so much of a piece with our bottomless addiction to all things digital, that most people will fail to notice what it has done to their lives, their choices, and above all their sense of self-determination — the feeling of freedom, as I once described it. “After all,” they will say with a frustrated shrug when you try to explain your misgivings about the national government having absolute practical authority over your physical wealth and your access to it, not to mention omniscient awareness of your every transaction, with everything that implies, “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.” The standard ego-saving rationalization of the defeated, the cowed, the subdued.
