CBDCs: Ultimate Tool of Oppression

Posted by freedomforall 6 months, 3 weeks ago to Government
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Excerpt:
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever,’ said O’Brien, the grand inquisitor of the totalitarian regime in Orwell’s futuristic novel 1984.

Alternatively, you could imagine a sandal.

Last month I visited Sutton Hoo, the famous Anglo-Saxon burial site of a king and his ship in Suffolk. A gold coin pendant in the museum caught my eye. It depicted a triumphant Roman standing over a conquered barbarian, his sandalled foot placed firmly on the supine opponent’s chest.
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Digital money and particularly Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) offer the potential for the government, through the central bank, to see every purchase and transfer you make, in real time. And not just see, but control.

Of course, our governments in the West will say that central bank money in digital form is convenient, safe, and stable. They will promise never to use it as an instrument of control, as an authoritarian government would. Here in the UK, our cosily-named proposed ‘Britcoin’ would supposedly exist alongside cash.

China, the country that took the lead with lockdowns, has taken the lead with CBDCs. It started researching CBDCs in 2014 and has been running live trials of DCNY (Digital Chinese Yuan) for years, with the size and scale increasing each time. The Chinese government has tested expiration dates to encourage users to spend their DCNY quickly, for times when the economy needs stimulus. That’s right, an expiry date for people’s money has already been trialled.

The Chinese ‘Social Credit System’ is a broad regulatory framework that is designed to score and incentivise the trustworthiness of individuals and companies. In other words, the government will either reward or punish various forms of behaviour using real-time monitoring, data gathering and sharing, curate blacklists and redlists, and use punishments, sanctions and rewards.

A report in 2019 found that 23 million people had been blacklisted from travelling by plane or train due to their low social credit score. In 2018 a student was denied access to university because her father was in debt. There isn’t a centralised and transparent set of rules, instead it’s been operated locally so far, but it has been reported that behaviour such as poor driving, spending too long playing video games, or posting fake news can result in low ratings, as well as more serious matters such as not fulfilling court orders."
SOURCE URL: https://brownstone.org/articles/cbdcs-ultimate-tool-of-oppression/


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