Central Bank Digital Currencies replace actual cash in hand with digital values which can be controlled by their issuers. As Central Banks operate in close consort with the reigning federal government of their land, such currencies would give those governments the ability to actually control the spending habits of their citizens. That control would be as easy to enforce as Twitter’s ability to “cancel” anyone guilty of so-called hate speech. Joe Biden has said he sees wonderful benefits to be derived from the widespread usage of C.B.D.C.s, but Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has announced his intention of pursuing the Democratic candidacy in the next federal election, disagrees.
In a recent Tweet, Kennedy said the following: “While cash transactions are anonymous, a #CBDC will allow the government to surveil all our private financial affairs. The central bank will have the power to enforce dollar limits on our transactions restricting where you can send money, where you can spend it, and when money expires.” The inevitable result, he said, would be to “grease the slippery slope to finance slavery and political tyranny.” It is hardly surprising that here in Canada, under the brilliant leadership of Trudeau, our central bank is also in the process of creating a C.B.D.C..
I will never stop reiterating the glaring irony of the fact that those who call themselves liberals are actually tyrants convinced that everyone ought to do and think as they say. The idea of a digital currency which would allow governments to monitor the spending habits of their citizens is repulsive. The fact that Canada’s “Liberals” have enacted a piece of legislation allowing them to censor online speech is equally so. While it is “conservatives” who generally argue in favor of the Individual’s right to live free of government interference, Mr. Kennedy is of course a Democrat and one must respect his willingness to inveigh against the ever increasing tendency of our Leftist elites to spread the myth that “ordinary” people [i.e., populists] are just too stupid to run their own lives or, in fact, spend their own money.
The buzz words used to justify ever increasing government surveillance of the general public are all too familiar. Our Western Democracies are apparently all being devastated by the cancers of right wing hate speech, misinformation and conspiracy theories. But guess what, those of you convinced of the unassailable sanctity of your Leftist world-view, yours is an Ideology rife with misinformation, one which espouses the ludicrous conspiracy theory that all human failure is the result of Oppression, one which in fact incites Hatred and Resentment for those who have Achieved.
It is baffling that the freedoms engendered in Capitalism are now seen as the main threat to our Western Democracies. Words no longer seem to have meaning. Up is down and black is white and Free Enterprise is now deemed to be inherently Oppressive! No one is suggesting that Capitalists are not guilty of engaging in unfair practices, but most of the socioeconomic “inequities” of both the past and present are more the result of the failures of those deemed to be oppressed than of the perfidy of the villains of Marx’s simplistic fairy tale. The Indigenous of the Americas fell before the onslaught of their Western European invaders not simply because of the unparalleled Evil of the latter, but because they were in fact radically less evolved in most every aspect of their lives. It was simple common sense for colonialists 500 years ago to assume that those they were encountering could benefit greatly from exposure to their Western culture. The genius [i.e., audacity] of the “intellectual” Left is to have so poisoned our culture that Common Sense is now seen to be a phobia of the Simple-Minded Majority [i.e., populists], those White citizens too stupid to realize that even though they may have worked tirelessly to achieve everything that brings them joy, they are actually privileged, oppressive monsters. The arrogance of this perspective is clearly antagonistic to the notion of Majority Rule, yet those who share it, those eager to cancel free speech, those looking to coerce the general public into abandoning all our traditional values in favor of Inclusiveness, ludicrously see themselves as the defenders of Democracy.
I have frequently declared my “conservatism” to be a latter day version of traditional Humanism. Socrates saw Man as an intelligent being for whom the free exchange of ideas was essential to the dialectic of cultural evolution. Enlightenment Humanists agreed. It was not the general German populace but rather an arrogant elite led by a psychopath that brought about the Holocaust. A healthy Democracy implicitly assumes the vast majority of people to be decent human beings fully capable of discerning genuine hate speech from rational, valid criticism. That the health of our Western Democracies has been relentlessly under assault from Leftist Demagogues convinced that their views on every issue are beyond discussion, has led a significant number of conscientious liberals to distance themselves from their brazen arrogance. Bill Maher, of course, is a constant critic of the “woke” Left, while Naomi Wolf, as I discussed in a recent blog, has basically declared the idea that Jan. 6 represented an attempt to violently overthrow the U.S. government, to be a ludicrous joke. Robert F. Kennedy’s denunciation of C.B.D.C.s reflects the same trend, his intended target no doubt being Joe Biden who praised the amazing benefits of crypto currencies while utterly unconcerned that they entailed an invasion of the privacy of every U.S. citizen using them.