By Angelov @Adobe Stock
UPDATE 1.23.24: In November 2019, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer CEnter for Science and International Affairs hosted “Digital Currency Wars: A National Security Crisis Simulation,” a live simulation of a White House National Security Council meeting during a major national security crisis. During the scenario, former government officials debated responses to a hypothetical scenario in which “the rise of digital currencies has created new economic, diplomatic, and security challenges for governments and private companies.” Watch the scenario below:
Originally posted on December 18, 2023.
James Howard Kunstler of LewRockwell.com tells his readers how the authorities will have the ability to push everyone around with a digital currency. He writes:
“Society lives and acts only in individuals…. Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. ” —Ludwig von Mises
Remember, you are a sovereign individual and the blob in our nation’s capital city is an undifferentiated mass of feckless protoplasm. You contain a cosmos of ideas and aspirations. The blob is an agglomeration of sham and failure. The blob stands for itself, not for our country. You and I can stand for our country.
Remember, also, that the economy of our country at its best was the sum of choices made by sovereign individuals, while the economy of the blob is a gelatinous buildup of unsound hypothesis having nothing to do with the pursuit of happiness. We sense this in the menacing rumors of a Federal Reserve digital currency, which entails the rehypothecation of our hopes and dreams into the blob’s waste-stream, turning everything we do — it can’t be put delicately — into shit.
The Fed digital currency will be used to cover-up the failure of end-state financialization of the economy. Finance, you understand, used to be a module of the economy, with a particular role to play. The purpose of finance, formerly, was to marshal surplus wealth from prior productive activity to make new productive activity possible. Financialization, however, does not do that. […]
A digital currency would likely first be tested among the most indigent in society, those with little or no income. It already is, actually, in the debit cards currently issued to illegal border-jumpers. Their card accounts are refilled monthly, making this the equivalent of a guaranteed basic income. Next, this privilege will be extended to the lower economic ranks of American citizens, and so on upward, until the whole middle-class and even the higher levels are enlisted, and then the authorities will have the ability to push everyone around.
That’s the hypothesis, anyway. I don’t believe it’s going to work. The authorities have underestimated the number of citizens who know what it means to be sovereign individuals. They will decline to be pushed around. They might even push back, start stomping on the blob’s tentacles as it reaches across the land. The citizens of one region or another of our country might go so far as to establish their own money, which would make them sovereign regions of sovereign individuals. That is going to be a problem that the blob and blobism cannot overcome.
Read more here.
