You Will Own Nothing

by Carol Roth

Property ownership was already on the decline, due to a variety of late-stage financial empire behaviors, before layering in the active efforts of governments and elites to limit all kinds of agency, freedoms, and rights and ensure that you will own nothing.

You own nothing and they own you—and, in many cases, your output. Your life becomes a subscription model.

To the casual observer, the WEF seems like a snotty boondoggle where the elites come together to signal how smart they are and how much they care about humanity. But these elite individuals have actually convinced themselves that they know what’s best for everyone, or perhaps, for some of these elite, they just want the cover for their power grab. Their ideas are the embodiment of central planning: a handful of people making decisions for the masses, usually done with opacity, based on their objectives and not the desires of the masses. This impacts every aspect of individual freedom and, by extension, prosperity.

One that has received some attention, but not enough, is the Great Reset, a plan first launched by Schwab in a book and then propagated by the WEF to leverage the Covid pandemic crisis to reshape the world—for the “good of humanity,” of course. Maybe even “to serve man”?

These elites want you as an indentured servant. They want to take your life, or at least take your life and rent it back to you.

The elite and well-connected find ways to direct more power to them at the expense of everyone else, even if they have talked themselves into believing they are being noble. To serve man, the tenet, becomes To Serve Man, the cookbook.

In a speech before the Business Roundtable in March 2022, a group made up of the CEOs of the biggest corporations in America—the elite of the US business elite—President Biden remarked that he believed there would be a new world order coming soon.

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”1

The dollar is amazingly still considered a store of value, even though it has lost almost 97 percent of its purchasing power since 1913, the year the Federal Reserve Act was passed, and 86 percent since 1971, when we came off the gold standard.

The Federal Reserve System, also known as the Federal Reserve or colloquially as the Fed, is the United States’ central bank. The assumed purpose of the Fed is to help guide the country’s economic and financial stability. More accurately, in recent years, it has become a tool to prop up Wall Street and enable capricious government spending.

Understanding how the elite have been orchestrating a power and money grab requires a deeper look at the ties between Wall Street and their most powerful financial players, and the Federal Reserve and the Treasury (as a representative of the government). The musical chairs between individuals in these roles and the people they have been connected to paint a very interesting picture. And in this game of musical chairs, when the music stops, it is you, the average American, who is left without a chair.

If a government wanted to control how you acted and interacted, push an agenda for “the good of society,” or exert some other control, the easiest way to do that is through money.

A CBDC is merely a digital version of whatever currency the government is already backing with its “full faith.” It is issued and regulated by the same monetary authority or central bank that issues the country’s fiat money.3 For the US, what is currently being considered is replacing or supplementing some of the Federal Reserve notes with digital US dollars. Instead of a dollar that you keep in your physical wallet, under a mattress, or in a cereal box, you would have a digital-equivalent place of storage, since those dollars’ forms are digital-only. That digital holder for money is a digital wallet.

One of the key aspects of digital currency is that it can be programmable. Because of this, each dollar could have a unique identifier. Think about when someone draws a picture on a dollar bill to see if it ever circulates back to them in the future. Now think of that at scale, using technology, with the government tracing it. Each digital dollar could have a unique code so that it can be traced as it circulates from person to person to business to business, giving the government a treasure trove of information about what you are doing, where you are doing it, and who you are doing it with.

Your wealth creation opportunities are already substantially under threat today from the government. The threat of more constraints on wealth creation increases exponentially if the government has a digital, programmable, trackable currency that it fully and effectively controls and can tie into social credit, formally or informally.

A digital currency is not a cryptocurrency. You will find some intentional confusion and even conflation around them, including by the governments considering them. This is intentional as central planners seek to piggyback on the interest in cryptocurrency without decentralization.9 Digital currencies, particularly those being proposed as CBDCs, are the opposite of cryptos. While CBDCs are digitally native and may share some technical architecture and design or even use blockchain technology, they are entirely centrally planned and controlled, taking away a key benefit that individuals are seeking from cryptocurrencies.

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.

You may be inclined to say that this would never happen in the US or other developed nations. But you would have said the same thing about many government mandates and actions over the past few years before they happened. Or what if the government wanted to stimulate the economy? They could give you currency that disappears if you don’t spend it right away, perhaps incentivizing you to shop at the businesses of cronies by only making it spendable at certain retailers. Again, this is not a stretch; China is already exploring a “use it or lose it” feature with its e-CNY digital currency.

Of course, privacy invasions will be sold under the guise of security, as they always are. The government will say they are just trying to monitor for terrorism. Or they need to ensure that financial crimes, such as money laundering, aren’t being committed. It will be in the “public interest” for them to have access to your information—it just won’t be in your interest. If you think that level of access, power, and control won’t be weaponized, I have a few bridges to sell you as well. The US government is consistently trying to find ways to get more and more of your financial information already, and it’s not for your benefit or to help you create wealth. In March 2021, under the American Rescue Plan, the Biden administration snuck in a tax-reporting requirement that went into effect January 1, 2022, that targets not megacorporations but hobbyists, side-giggers, and small online sellers.

Much like a product advertised on late-night television infomercials, for developed economies like the United States that have many private, easy-to-use payment transfer solutions, a CBDC looks much like a solution searching for a problem, as opposed to the other way around. Simply put, we don’t need it.

Regardless of the reason, a CBDC allows those who have the intention of pushing social credit and marrying that concept to money an easy path forward. This is a path that does not bode well for your property rights. It also allows those who may have—shall we say—“questionable” intentions to add fuel to the fire. The WEF, for example, has positioned itself to provide “guidance” to governments on CBDCs via its Digital Currency Governance Consortium and related resource center.

They say they are trying to protect us, but we need protection from them. Transacting freely and privately is critical in maintaining property rights and wealth creation. Any movement against that moves you closer to owning nothing.

Perhaps less obvious, in recent decades technology has also produced tools, and people wielding such tools, that are destroying individual freedoms, forcing us as individuals to give up our rights, our sovereignty, our agency, our privacy, and our wealth.