Given that CBDC is a growing topic among politicians, we thought this was as good a time as any to describe some basic beliefs about it and MMT adherents as discussed many times in this space and proven accurate most timed
How CBDC Works:
CBDC will enable the government to observe and control you from a distance. It is the device that will permit those who wish to exercise authority and control over others with no physical interface. It is the tool that enables the situation in the movie Elysium to happen. It is a technological re-imposition of caste system economics.
**CBDC is ultimately, a remote control with a universal adapter over everyone’s behavior. **
Return of Feudalism:
CBDC will restore the direct domination over men associated with feudalism, as opposed to indirect domination (which is what portable money created under capitalism) afforded us with physical money.
You eventually will not be able to leave your Lord’s village if it is adopted. This is truly fictional money. You “own” it, but someone else controls it.
MMT and CBDC:
CBDC is the killer application of MMT. MMT believes money (at least the money they will make you use) is not a store of value, but only a medium of exchange and unit of accountancy. But CBDC puts exchange control of those two monetary aspects in government’s hands. The unit of accountancy keeps tabs on you, not them.
It is very dangerous stuff. It is techno-feudalism. Even Marx of all people, admitted that Capitalism was a far better situation than what came before it, Feudalism:
Marx always emphasized that the exchange between worker and capitalist is “just” in the sense that workers there is no *direct* exploitation here. The workers are at least paid the full value of their exploitation by capitalists.
After receiving their money they can go and do as they want and be “exploited” anywhere else they want, and in their own time. Portable wealth ensured freedom from direct domination by authorities. Capitalism, even Marx had to admit was an improvement over its predecessor, Feudalism.
So while, in a market economy, the worker remains de facto dependent, this dependency was at least enacted in the form of a Free market exchange between the worker and other persons, instead of the direct servitude or even physical coercion implemented in Feudal times- Source
Rand and Marx Agree:
The point of bringing Marx 2 up is; that he is saying the same thing Ayn Rand said up top; that relations between people assume the guise of relations among things. Without money as a physical portable intermediary, leeway is given for direct domination over another via blood, whips, and guns.
Marx said relationships between people manifest in the relationships among the things they use to interact with each other. So if you do not give a man money and the ability to take that money and go elsewhere.. you risk using and abusing the power that resulting control gives you…
Ayn Rand said the same thing: “Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your destruction. When money ceases to become how men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other.”
Take away the objectivity, portability, permanency and universal neutrality that money affords and you will guarantee physical coercion at some point. You may own it, but they control it. That is feudalism
Everyone has what we used to call their “F* You money”— The money that allows them to not take any more abuse and move somewhere else if pushed too hard. Take that away, or the ability for a man to ply his work elsewhere and take the money with him and you have indentured servitude, serfdom.
