Rickards: Yes, It Can Happen Here!

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

I’ve warned repeatedly about the dangers that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) pose to personal liberties.

I’ve warned how they would allow governments to monitor every transaction you make, which basically means a surveillance state.

This facilitates the creation of a social credit system that allows governments to punish those who engage in unapproved activity such as buying guns, donating money to the wrong political party, buying unapproved literature, etc.

The government will even know your physical whereabouts at the point of purchase.

People could be denied employment opportunities, educational opportunities, access to banking systems, even the ability to travel.

I’ve also said that China is well along the way to establishing a social credit system. Well, if you have any doubt that China’s social credit score is real, consider this:

Millions of Chinese have been denied the ability to travel by plane or train because their social credit scores are too low.

It CAN Happen Here

If you think nothing like that could ever happen here, you might want to reconsider.

Think of all the draconian policies that were imposed on Americans during COVID. Think of the lockdowns, the censorship, vaccine mandates, etc.

Before the pandemic, you probably wouldn’t have thought that any of this was possible. But it all happened. When you think of it in that light, you begin to understand that some type of social credit system in the U.S. really isn’t that far-fetched.

It might not be as extreme as China’s system. It’ll all be made to sound very benign, even necessary, to support “our democracy” against MAGA types, white supremacists, climate deniers and domestic terrorists.

As Ronald Reagan said, “If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism.”

But this system would operate on the same principles as the Chinese system. Consider this hypothetical case…

Welcome to the 15-Minute City

Greenies want to mandate “15-minute cities” where you can walk everywhere in town within 15 minutes, which means you won’t need your car to visit a doctor, dry cleaner, grocery store, pharmacy or any of the other locations we routinely visit for errands and necessities.

That may sound attractive if you chose it voluntarily. But that’s not what the greenies have in mind. They want 15-minute cities as a Trojan horse to eliminate automobiles entirely and force you to ride bicycles or use public transportation. In the end, you’ll need a permit to fly to another city.

The permits will be rationed and you’ll have to put yourself on a waiting list until your turn. You can pay for your ticket with the new central bank digital currency, assuming your social credit score is high enough and you didn’t vote for the wrong candidate in the last election.

In this vision, citizens will be confined to small towns or cities for extended periods. Travel will be tightly restricted. Appliances will be downsized with no consumer choice allowed. Taxes will be imposed on targeted activities to discourage use.

Education will be turned to indoctrination to raise a generation who believe in the climate lies needed to gain support for these measures (that kind of indoctrination has been underway for some years).

It’s coercive, restrictive and arrogant. It’s a world where the elites control everything and you do as you’re told. It’s a world based on lies and fear.

Again, if you think that’s just being paranoid, I refer you once more to what happened during the pandemic.

The Censorship-Industrial Complex

We know that the government has engaged in censorship designed to shut down unapproved viewpoints.

Thanks to Elon Musk opening up the Twitter Files to the public, we now know just how rotten and corrupt the White House, FBI and Twitter under Jack Dorsey were in terms of influencing the 2020 election, crushing voices that said the vaccines weren’t really safe and effective (they aren’t) and saying that Russia is winning in Ukraine (they are).

Twitter created a separate portal for FBI goons to target individual Americans and to deplatform them from using Twitter. (Facebook and Google were even worse but they are still under the same control. So we don’t have the internal files we do for Twitter.)

It’s an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment for the U.S. government to engage in any censorship of this kind.

Instead, the FBI and White House used Twitter as a kind of private-sector hatchet man to cut off anyone who dissented from the government agenda.

Even that may be unconstitutional because Twitter is acting as a proxy for the government in this instance. The courts will ultimately decide that issue, but for now, we know that both the government and Twitter were engaged in rank censorship of everyday American voices.

It can’t get any worse, right? Guess again. We’re now learning that the Twitter-FBI censorship activities went far beyond silencing critics of government policy.

Combine a Social Credit System With a Police State

The FBI also took orders from Ukraine. It turns out the Ukrainian secret security service sent lists of reporters and other U.S. citizens who were not supporting the Zelenskyy regime running the Ukrainian war effort.

The FBI was told to forward the list to Twitter, deactivate the anti-Ukraine accounts and hand over user data to the Ukrainian secret police. I’m active on Twitter and I’m opposed to the war, so for all I know my name was on the list. I don’t care. I’ve always written what I want, and I’m not intimidated by the FBI or the Ukrainian secret police.

Still, many accounts were censored on this basis. No one is surprised to learn Ukraine is a police state. Americans are still learning just how much of a police state the U.S. has become.

Now throw a social credit system into the mix. Just think of the ways the government can punish dissenters.

This is the Brave New World that we’re facing. And it’s all facilitated by central bank digital currencies, which enable the type of surveillance state that’s always been the dream of tyrants.

They’ll just say it’s being done in the name of democracy. Don’t fall for it.

Is this future inevitable? No, it isn’t. But it’s coming sooner than you expect unless citizens join hands, reassert the truth and push the elites back into a corner where they belong.

You might not be able to fight back easily in the world of CBDCs, but as I always say, there is one nondigital, nonhackable, nontraceable form of money you can still get your hands on.

It’s called gold. Get some while you still can.