You Will Own Nothing

by Carol Roth

The biggest concerns around a CBDC, particularly in the United States, relate to individual rights. A US CBDC (aka a “digital dollar”) threatens your rights and freedoms on many accounts. It would mean that a government-sanctioned entity could have complete access to everything that you do that involves a monetary transaction, and could even freeze your access to money and transactions altogether. CBDCs threaten your privacy, as well as enable the government to tie your access to your money to behaviors. As I covered in the opening to this chapter, money incentivizes behavior. If we further centralize money, the government could weaponize it as a tool to implement more social policy and even a formal social credit system. As we have seen in many instances, the government in the US, as well as governments abroad, is not hesitating when it comes to weaponizing money. A CBDC converges the new financial world order with social credit, backed by a tangible way to enforce it. Digital dollars could impact just about everything you do and certainly everything you own.