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I don’t really get the author’s argument. A lot of it seems very “slippery slope” to me. The government already can (and does) restrict what people can and can

I don’t really get the author’s argument. A lot of it seems very “slippery slope” to me. The government already can (and does) restrict what people can and cannot buy. The idea of limiting spending on certain things (like gas) is interesting, but that isn’t exactly a new thing. The government could already just straight up ban the sale of anything, this would just give them more nuance to their policy. Other things mentioned, like automatic taxes and preventing money laundering, seem… good? The more extreme authoritarian uses cases like financial “imprisonment” are certainly bad, but similarly can already basically be done. Look up what happens to those few people each year that are accidentally declared dead and can’t open lines of credit etc. The government can already ruin your life with the press of a button. I’m not sure I support CBDCs, but these seem like weak arguments. There are definitely benefits to taking away power from existing financial institutions.

program_whiz 5y ago
"slippery slope" is supposed to be a fallacy, I call it "seeing past patterns and extrapolating". Every problem we have as a society came about because of slippery slopes. They began from a relatively benign start and progressed organically as entropy, incompetence, and greed pushed it forward to a state that was dangerous or uncontrollable (e.g. politics, environment, criminal justice, etc). The key difference in the author's argument and your counter-examples are that things like "being declared dead" doesn't benefit anyone (unless you were any enemy). Take a look at imminent domain, drug seisures, and for-profit prisons if you want to see how "virtuous and obviously needed power" go on to be used when inevitably someone corrupt or incompetent comes to power. Once you create a lever for the government, it will at the very least go into the playbook of "possible tools to be used for control" (or more popularly, to 'help' people). Kind of how OSHA was the excuse to force all employers to require vaccines. Whether or not you agree with vaccines, can you see that the government thinking went: 1. We have an outcome we want, that is obviously good 2. Stupid citizens aren't complying with the Executive Order 3. How can we make them comply using something we have, and excuse it as "within the legal limits"? 4. Ah! OSHA exists and has broad powers, maybe we can say that we will fine anyone who doesn't have all workers vaccinated $150K per worker per month! That literally happened a couple months ago, so not sure how many more examples you need before "slippery slope" of "people spending 10s of millions to acquire a powerful office want power" is confirmed.
tastyfreeze 5y ago
I am not comfortable giving government more power to control the economy. The government was never meant to have the power over the economy they currently do. We are over 100 years in to the reign of the Fed and I see very little good that has come from it.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Central banks are powerless institutions, don't believe the propaganda. Rich people still run the show.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kasey_junk 5y ago
  Can you expand on that for a bit? I look at the history of governments and I see less direct control of the economy throughout history. For large chunks of history governments owned most of the economic output of their constituents in the form of slavery. Even in the supposed free market heyday of the late 1800s USA the government controlled most of the productive land either outright or via land grants & treaties, they controlled right of ways for the major tech innovations like the telegram & railroads and they enforced labor rights at the end of a bayonet. Monetary policy seems like a softer power than the previous regime to me. What am I missing?
  - danielmarkbruce 5y ago
    Whether what you are saying is true or not - on face value it appears that when the founding fathers in the US were laying the groundwork for the new government, it was envisaged that the role the federal government had would be smaller than it is now. Whether that is good or bad is a different argument, but it seems on face value to be a given it wasn't intended by those folks. The example given re the Fed - I don't believe there was any suggestion by the founding fathers of a central bank. Banks used to issue their own money.
    - kasey_junk 5y ago
frankfrankfrank 5y ago
I think you’re missing the point that with “paper” currency you still have choice. You can choose to buy things based on your own volition, whether genuinely bad for you like meth maybe, or simply just Russian vodka; because Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia and the populace has lost their mind over hate week … but you still happen to like Russian vodka.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  Paper currency would still exist. CBDC is strictly a replacement for digital money
  - hellojesus 5y ago
    It's phased 1. The goal is to get CBDC in place then place limits on cash purchases (see France, etc.), then incentivize merchants to only do business in CBDC. Like a boa slowly suffocating the populace.
danielmarkbruce 5y ago
A central bank digital currency would allow the central bank to take your money. Right now, a government agency would need to ask your bank to take your money. That bank will have lawyers and they'll ask questions. You can guarantee Jamie Dimon at Chase doesn't just say "oh, well ok then, sure". He'll want to see the relevant documentation, have his people inspect it, and push back if he doesn't like it.
- gspr 5y ago
  The only safeguard against state institutions taking your things is strong laws preventing them from doing so. This is a fact independent of what kind of currency is used.
- nullc 5y ago
  > Right now, a government agency would need to ask your bank to take your money A government agency seizing your money rather than asking a bank to do so would often be an improvement over what we have in the US today: Banks routinely freeze peoples accounts with zero due process and little recourse, through the implicit (but not legally recognized) coercion of the impossible maze of bank regulation. When your assets are frozen directly by the government you're more likely to get access to some amount of due process-- though not always (see: civil forfeiture). In any case, since banks absolutely never stand up against the government to protect ordinary customers (drug cartels will billion dollar scale accounts are another matter...) it's hard to imagine a CBDC being worse in this particular respect.
- pavlov 5y ago
  A central bank also has lawyers who ask questions? Sometimes it feels like some people imagine government working like this: Biden calls up Powell and says “Let’s take all the money from our political enemy N.N today” to which Powell replies “Yeah LOL awesome, my minions are pushing the button now”
  - danielmarkbruce 5y ago
    Sure - you are right. But one more layer of lawyers asking questions on such a request is, imo, extremely valuable. Especially when the extra lawyers are being paid by a private entity who is more answerable to shareholders and customers than the central bank (or whoever asks them).
christophilus 5y ago
If I have physical cash in my pocket, I can go just about anywhere in the world and spend it however I please. You give that freedom up with a CBDC. I much prefer a world where every criminal has the freedom that cash affords to a world where a handful of criminals control all the cash.
- parkingrift 5y ago
  Where did you see that they are trying to ban cash? Genuinely haven’t heard about this.
  - hammock 5y ago
    It's all over. Just google "war on cash." Here's one from Steve Forbes himself, not your typical Forbes blogspam https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2016/03/01/the-great-cash-grab/?sh=5d9e3baf4aed https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2016/03/01/the-grea... The tldr is that cashless a) can be perfectly surveilled b) enables negative interest rates Curious, where do you typically get your economic news? Based on your answer I can provide a couple other places to round out your intake.
    - hellojesus 5y ago
      I also recommend to the commentor they check out Civil Asset Forfeiture laws.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      A one year expiration date is good enough to implement negative interest rates on cash. Once a bill is invalid you can exchange it for a fee to get a valid one. If the expiry date is a replaceable sticker then it may be possible to have shorter durations but one year is good enough.
      - hammock 5y ago
        Expiration dates are absolutely a part of the cashless/CBDC vision, and have been written about before by the Fed, the IMF, etc. Expiring cash isn't enough though, because most money is in electronic form on bank balance sheets. Hence digital currency.
macinjosh 5y ago
You start with: > I don’t really get the author’s argument. A lot of it seems very “slippery slope” to me. Ok, so what? There is a reason people use that analogy. It is a real thing that happens. You go on to describe it in action yourself: > The more extreme authoritarian uses cases like financial “imprisonment” are certainly bad, but similarly can already basically be done. This is nihilism in its worst form. No one is saying they are breaking virgin ground here. Cash is one of the last bastions of financial privacy. One can spend it without a name being attached. That is valuable for many legitimate things. A CBDC eliminates that completely and we slide yet closer to authoritarianism. Why build a tool no one needs and can be used for oppression?
- danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  Exactly. "They can already do that" is a strange argument used here, and it's the same argument often used as to why some new product/business doesn't matter, or isn't interesting. If you make X easier to do, it will get done more. It's close to 100% certain.
ekianjo 5y ago
> lot of it seems very “slippery slope” to me. Most phenomenons are in the slippery slope category. Very rarely you see binary and immediate transformations in societies. The point raised is much increased power over your money and your utter lack of alternatives in the future. Seems like a logical conclusion of where we are headed.
- hammock 5y ago
  For example, think about how many of the pandemic restrictions would have been called "slippery slope" in February 2020. Curfews? Closed businesses? Mask mandates? Silently-installed location-tracking apps? Vaccine mandates? Vaccine passports? Involuntary quarantine camps?
  - rswail 5y ago
    All of which were actually expressed in legislation already or passed by elected government and accepted by courts as valid consitutionally. All of which have been used in the past, and, just like in the past, are being relaxed after they are no longer required.
    - hammock 5y ago
      Great points! >Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to uphold the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast Military Area during World War II. The decision has been widely criticized,[1] with some scholars describing it as "an odious and discredited artifact of popular bigotry"[2] and as "a stain on American jurisprudence".[3] Chief Justice John Roberts explicitly repudiated the Korematsu decision in his majority opinion in the 2018 case of Trump v. Hawaii.[4] The case is often cited as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States
      - hellojesus 5y ago
        Agreed. Let us also acknowledge that the government violated the 5th ammendment when force closing businesses, and I hope the nation gets sued into bankruptcy for that gross violation.
rgrieselhuber 5y ago
It’s ultimately a question of whether it is moral to use violence on non-violent people.
forum_ghost 5y ago
>There are definitely benefits to taking away power from existing financial institutions. Sounds like you are against CBDC entirely then, as banks are still centrally controlled, and handing banking to a single entity seems almost like abolishing banking as such, and only allowing one(1) bank: the government.
roughly 5y ago
I'm not in the Crypto camp, but - I think the argument here is that there's a lot of things that a government can do on paper that it can't actually do in practice. Banning goods is an obvious one - drugs still find their way around in the economy. A lot of regulations play this way, too - rules on what can and can't be done tend to attenuate with distance from cities (ask anyone in a rural area what they think of gun laws - and then ask them what they've actually got in their gun safe). Whether or not you think this is good effectively depends on how much trust you have in the current laws to have gotten it all right, but bear in mind homosexuality was against the law in all parts of this country until the 60s and some up into the 2000s, and weed only started becoming decriminalized for recreational use in 2012. I think the core argument is that there's currently a difference between the government's powers on paper and its powers in reality, that widespread government-controlled digital currencies have the potential to substantially close that gap, and that that is a Bad thing because progress in society often relies on and grows in that gap. The counterargument that tax dodging, money laundering, and all other kinds of ill also happen in that gap is true, but that's the cost for keeping our options open.
- softwarebeware 5y ago
  Well said
- legulere 5y ago
  Governments already have all that power with existing non-cash money. You can't really use cash for buying things online, but still drugs get sold online
  - nightski 5y ago
    That's not a good argument to make it even easier. I'm not saying an argument doesn't exist, just the fact that they have the power in a more limited form is not a good excuse to give them the power at a click of a button across the entire economy.
FranksTV 5y ago
Yeah, I mean tow trucks exist, and the government can tow your car if you park illegally. No one argues that our cars aren't safe anymore.
- hammock 5y ago
  They want control of your car as well. https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/infrastructure-bill-signed-by-president-biden-includes-anti-drunk-driving-system-mandate-for-new-cars https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/infrastructure-bill-signed... >The cameras would monitor eye gaze to check for impairments. Another option is sensors that would determine how much alcohol is in a person's sweat... "The drunk or otherwise impaired driver will get in their car, and it either won't start or won't move"
TeeMassive 5y ago
> A lot of it seems very “slippery slope” to me. Anything that extrapolates the past to extract patterns and make predictions about the future is a form of "slippery slope": science, statistics, forensics, political science, etc.
hndamien 5y ago
There are already a few automatic taxes - inflation, payroll tax, GST/VAT. This will just embolden more aggressive theft.
kragen 5y ago
The argument is (1) that a CBDC would give the government a lot more power and (2) that we need structural protections to prevent government abuses rather than merely government policies, so (3) we need to not have a CBDC. You seem to disagree with premise (1), but you give only very weak reasons to reject it. Biden's executive order strongly supports premise (1), as do the Chinese CBDC policies mentioned in the article as well as the other arguments it gives. Sometimes people disagree with premise (2) on, for example, naive Rousseauian grounds: the government merely represents the will of the sovereign people and therefore cannot do anything harmful to that people. After 232 years of the most heinous atrocities being committed in the name of the Will of the People it's amazing that some people still believe this. Checks and balances, which is to say, limits on state power, have been essential protections against changes of government policy since states have existed; totalitarian states have never been happy ones.
smaudet 5y ago
The sibling comment says it more in depth, succinctly: You don't own your own money. This is somewhat true in practice with credit, checking accounts - only large entities are allowed to even make purchases such as cars, houses anymore (practically - check or cash is a not often practiced option). When I have possessions, I can say they are either under my power or entrusted to someone else - any good finance advice is to diversify as much as possible. If all money pratically becomes some virtual 'fake' money, that's not possible - I don't have possessions at that point, I'm a literal slave of the state - given some basic pittance which is dictated how and what I must spend it on. A lot of people end up paying for similar things, cost of living, subscriptions - to some extent we are slaves to society already, but we aren't required to be. If I sacrifice something unnecessary, I can trade for something else. Being given what amounts to fancy foodstamps is just not the same thing - without a lot unpaid social work I cannot turn those foodstamps into a car, or save up for my son's college, pay for a class at a local Uni, or support doctor's without borders through equipment donations. Only one person gets to decide that in the painted picture - the govt. If viewed as another sort of interest-less bond, maybe they can make a certain type of sense, but only in the same way I might put 20 bucks on a nintendo or xbox account. The "innovations" don't sound that great in practice, and mostly sound limiting.

program_whiz 5y ago

"slippery slope" is supposed to be a fallacy, I call it "seeing past patterns and extrapolating". Every problem we have as a society came about because of slippery slopes. They began from a relatively benign start and progressed organically as entropy, incompetence, and greed pushed it forward to a state that was dangerous or uncontrollable (e.g. politics, environment, criminal justice, etc). The key difference in the author's argument and your counter-examples are that things like "being declared dead" doesn't benefit anyone (unless you were any enemy). Take a look at imminent domain, drug seisures, and for-profit prisons if you want to see how "virtuous and obviously needed power" go on to be used when inevitably someone corrupt or incompetent comes to power. Once you create a lever for the government, it will at the very least go into the playbook of "possible tools to be used for control" (or more popularly, to 'help' people). Kind of how OSHA was the excuse to force all employers to require vaccines. Whether or not you agree with vaccines, can you see that the government thinking went: 1. We have an outcome we want, that is obviously good 2. Stupid citizens aren't complying with the Executive Order 3. How can we make them comply using something we have, and excuse it as "within the legal limits"? 4. Ah! OSHA exists and has broad powers, maybe we can say that we will fine anyone who doesn't have all workers vaccinated $150K per worker per month! That literally happened a couple months ago, so not sure how many more examples you need before "slippery slope" of "people spending 10s of millions to acquire a powerful office want power" is confirmed.

tastyfreeze 5y ago

I am not comfortable giving government more power to control the economy. The government was never meant to have the power over the economy they currently do. We are over 100 years in to the reign of the Fed and I see very little good that has come from it.

imtringued 5y ago
Central banks are powerless institutions, don't believe the propaganda. Rich people still run the show.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kasey_junk 5y ago
Can you expand on that for a bit? I look at the history of governments and I see less direct control of the economy throughout history. For large chunks of history governments owned most of the economic output of their constituents in the form of slavery. Even in the supposed free market heyday of the late 1800s USA the government controlled most of the productive land either outright or via land grants & treaties, they controlled right of ways for the major tech innovations like the telegram & railroads and they enforced labor rights at the end of a bayonet. Monetary policy seems like a softer power than the previous regime to me. What am I missing?
- danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  Whether what you are saying is true or not - on face value it appears that when the founding fathers in the US were laying the groundwork for the new government, it was envisaged that the role the federal government had would be smaller than it is now. Whether that is good or bad is a different argument, but it seems on face value to be a given it wasn't intended by those folks. The example given re the Fed - I don't believe there was any suggestion by the founding fathers of a central bank. Banks used to issue their own money.
  - kasey_junk 5y ago

frankfrankfrank 5y ago

I think you’re missing the point that with “paper” currency you still have choice. You can choose to buy things based on your own volition, whether genuinely bad for you like meth maybe, or simply just Russian vodka; because Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia and the populace has lost their mind over hate week … but you still happen to like Russian vodka.

cuteboy19 5y ago
Paper currency would still exist. CBDC is strictly a replacement for digital money
- hellojesus 5y ago
  It's phased 1. The goal is to get CBDC in place then place limits on cash purchases (see France, etc.), then incentivize merchants to only do business in CBDC. Like a boa slowly suffocating the populace.

danielmarkbruce 5y ago

A central bank digital currency would allow the central bank to take your money. Right now, a government agency would need to ask your bank to take your money. That bank will have lawyers and they'll ask questions. You can guarantee Jamie Dimon at Chase doesn't just say "oh, well ok then, sure". He'll want to see the relevant documentation, have his people inspect it, and push back if he doesn't like it.

gspr 5y ago
The only safeguard against state institutions taking your things is strong laws preventing them from doing so. This is a fact independent of what kind of currency is used.
nullc 5y ago
> Right now, a government agency would need to ask your bank to take your money A government agency seizing your money rather than asking a bank to do so would often be an improvement over what we have in the US today: Banks routinely freeze peoples accounts with zero due process and little recourse, through the implicit (but not legally recognized) coercion of the impossible maze of bank regulation. When your assets are frozen directly by the government you're more likely to get access to some amount of due process-- though not always (see: civil forfeiture). In any case, since banks absolutely never stand up against the government to protect ordinary customers (drug cartels will billion dollar scale accounts are another matter...) it's hard to imagine a CBDC being worse in this particular respect.
pavlov 5y ago
A central bank also has lawyers who ask questions? Sometimes it feels like some people imagine government working like this: Biden calls up Powell and says “Let’s take all the money from our political enemy N.N today” to which Powell replies “Yeah LOL awesome, my minions are pushing the button now”
- danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  Sure - you are right. But one more layer of lawyers asking questions on such a request is, imo, extremely valuable. Especially when the extra lawyers are being paid by a private entity who is more answerable to shareholders and customers than the central bank (or whoever asks them).

christophilus 5y ago

If I have physical cash in my pocket, I can go just about anywhere in the world and spend it however I please. You give that freedom up with a CBDC. I much prefer a world where every criminal has the freedom that cash affords to a world where a handful of criminals control all the cash.

parkingrift 5y ago
Where did you see that they are trying to ban cash? Genuinely haven’t heard about this.
- hammock 5y ago
  It's all over. Just google "war on cash." Here's one from Steve Forbes himself, not your typical Forbes blogspam https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2016/03/01/the-great-cash-grab/?sh=5d9e3baf4aed https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2016/03/01/the-grea... The tldr is that cashless a) can be perfectly surveilled b) enables negative interest rates Curious, where do you typically get your economic news? Based on your answer I can provide a couple other places to round out your intake.
  - hellojesus 5y ago
    I also recommend to the commentor they check out Civil Asset Forfeiture laws.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    A one year expiration date is good enough to implement negative interest rates on cash. Once a bill is invalid you can exchange it for a fee to get a valid one. If the expiry date is a replaceable sticker then it may be possible to have shorter durations but one year is good enough.
    - hammock 5y ago
      Expiration dates are absolutely a part of the cashless/CBDC vision, and have been written about before by the Fed, the IMF, etc. Expiring cash isn't enough though, because most money is in electronic form on bank balance sheets. Hence digital currency.

macinjosh 5y ago

You start with: > I don’t really get the author’s argument. A lot of it seems very “slippery slope” to me. Ok, so what? There is a reason people use that analogy. It is a real thing that happens. You go on to describe it in action yourself: > The more extreme authoritarian uses cases like financial “imprisonment” are certainly bad, but similarly can already basically be done. This is nihilism in its worst form. No one is saying they are breaking virgin ground here. Cash is one of the last bastions of financial privacy. One can spend it without a name being attached. That is valuable for many legitimate things. A CBDC eliminates that completely and we slide yet closer to authoritarianism. Why build a tool no one needs and can be used for oppression?

danielmarkbruce 5y ago
Exactly. "They can already do that" is a strange argument used here, and it's the same argument often used as to why some new product/business doesn't matter, or isn't interesting. If you make X easier to do, it will get done more. It's close to 100% certain.

ekianjo 5y ago

> lot of it seems very “slippery slope” to me. Most phenomenons are in the slippery slope category. Very rarely you see binary and immediate transformations in societies. The point raised is much increased power over your money and your utter lack of alternatives in the future. Seems like a logical conclusion of where we are headed.

hammock 5y ago
For example, think about how many of the pandemic restrictions would have been called "slippery slope" in February 2020. Curfews? Closed businesses? Mask mandates? Silently-installed location-tracking apps? Vaccine mandates? Vaccine passports? Involuntary quarantine camps?
- rswail 5y ago
  All of which were actually expressed in legislation already or passed by elected government and accepted by courts as valid consitutionally. All of which have been used in the past, and, just like in the past, are being relaxed after they are no longer required.
  - hammock 5y ago
    Great points! >Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to uphold the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast Military Area during World War II. The decision has been widely criticized,[1] with some scholars describing it as "an odious and discredited artifact of popular bigotry"[2] and as "a stain on American jurisprudence".[3] Chief Justice John Roberts explicitly repudiated the Korematsu decision in his majority opinion in the 2018 case of Trump v. Hawaii.[4] The case is often cited as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States
    - hellojesus 5y ago
      Agreed. Let us also acknowledge that the government violated the 5th ammendment when force closing businesses, and I hope the nation gets sued into bankruptcy for that gross violation.

rgrieselhuber 5y ago

It’s ultimately a question of whether it is moral to use violence on non-violent people.

forum_ghost 5y ago

>There are definitely benefits to taking away power from existing financial institutions. Sounds like you are against CBDC entirely then, as banks are still centrally controlled, and handing banking to a single entity seems almost like abolishing banking as such, and only allowing one(1) bank: the government.

roughly 5y ago

I'm not in the Crypto camp, but - I think the argument here is that there's a lot of things that a government can do on paper that it can't actually do in practice. Banning goods is an obvious one - drugs still find their way around in the economy. A lot of regulations play this way, too - rules on what can and can't be done tend to attenuate with distance from cities (ask anyone in a rural area what they think of gun laws - and then ask them what they've actually got in their gun safe). Whether or not you think this is good effectively depends on how much trust you have in the current laws to have gotten it all right, but bear in mind homosexuality was against the law in all parts of this country until the 60s and some up into the 2000s, and weed only started becoming decriminalized for recreational use in 2012. I think the core argument is that there's currently a difference between the government's powers on paper and its powers in reality, that widespread government-controlled digital currencies have the potential to substantially close that gap, and that that is a Bad thing because progress in society often relies on and grows in that gap. The counterargument that tax dodging, money laundering, and all other kinds of ill also happen in that gap is true, but that's the cost for keeping our options open.

softwarebeware 5y ago
Well said
legulere 5y ago
Governments already have all that power with existing non-cash money. You can't really use cash for buying things online, but still drugs get sold online
- nightski 5y ago
  That's not a good argument to make it even easier. I'm not saying an argument doesn't exist, just the fact that they have the power in a more limited form is not a good excuse to give them the power at a click of a button across the entire economy.

FranksTV 5y ago

Yeah, I mean tow trucks exist, and the government can tow your car if you park illegally. No one argues that our cars aren't safe anymore.

hammock 5y ago
They want control of your car as well. https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/infrastructure-bill-signed-by-president-biden-includes-anti-drunk-driving-system-mandate-for-new-cars https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/infrastructure-bill-signed... >The cameras would monitor eye gaze to check for impairments. Another option is sensors that would determine how much alcohol is in a person's sweat... "The drunk or otherwise impaired driver will get in their car, and it either won't start or won't move"

TeeMassive 5y ago

> A lot of it seems very “slippery slope” to me. Anything that extrapolates the past to extract patterns and make predictions about the future is a form of "slippery slope": science, statistics, forensics, political science, etc.

hndamien 5y ago

There are already a few automatic taxes - inflation, payroll tax, GST/VAT. This will just embolden more aggressive theft.

kragen 5y ago

The argument is (1) that a CBDC would give the government a lot more power and (2) that we need structural protections to prevent government abuses rather than merely government policies, so (3) we need to not have a CBDC. You seem to disagree with premise (1), but you give only very weak reasons to reject it. Biden's executive order strongly supports premise (1), as do the Chinese CBDC policies mentioned in the article as well as the other arguments it gives. Sometimes people disagree with premise (2) on, for example, naive Rousseauian grounds: the government merely represents the will of the sovereign people and therefore cannot do anything harmful to that people. After 232 years of the most heinous atrocities being committed in the name of the Will of the People it's amazing that some people still believe this. Checks and balances, which is to say, limits on state power, have been essential protections against changes of government policy since states have existed; totalitarian states have never been happy ones.

smaudet 5y ago

The sibling comment says it more in depth, succinctly: You don't own your own money. This is somewhat true in practice with credit, checking accounts - only large entities are allowed to even make purchases such as cars, houses anymore (practically - check or cash is a not often practiced option). When I have possessions, I can say they are either under my power or entrusted to someone else - any good finance advice is to diversify as much as possible. If all money pratically becomes some virtual 'fake' money, that's not possible - I don't have possessions at that point, I'm a literal slave of the state - given some basic pittance which is dictated how and what I must spend it on. A lot of people end up paying for similar things, cost of living, subscriptions - to some extent we are slaves to society already, but we aren't required to be. If I sacrifice something unnecessary, I can trade for something else. Being given what amounts to fancy foodstamps is just not the same thing - without a lot unpaid social work I cannot turn those foodstamps into a car, or save up for my son's college, pay for a class at a local Uni, or support doctor's without borders through equipment donations. Only one person gets to decide that in the painted picture - the govt. If viewed as another sort of interest-less bond, maybe they can make a certain type of sense, but only in the same way I might put 20 bucks on a nintendo or xbox account. The "innovations" don't sound that great in practice, and mostly sound limiting.