KINSLEY GAFFE: World Economic Forum speaker (accidentally) makes the case against digital government currency.

“We are at the cusp of physical currency essentially disappearing,” the economist said at the WEF event. “If you think about the benefits of digital money, there are huge potential gains…It’s not just about digital forms of digital currency; you can have programmability — units of central bank currency with expiry dates.”

By this, Prasad means that your money could be “programmed” so that you must spend it by a certain date or it disappears. The government could also exercise this control over what you can buy with your money, too.

“You could have […] a potentially better — or some people might say a darker world — where the government decides that units of central bank money can be used to purchase some things, but not other things that it deems less desirable like say ammunition, or drugs, or pornography,” Prasad said, “And that is very powerful in terms of the use of a CBDC, and I think also extremely dangerous to central banks.”

This is the major danger of a CBDC. With a cash-based system, while the government ultimately creates the currency, it cannot control how people use it once it’s out there. However, with a CBDC, politicians could quite literally block you from spending money on “undesirable” things. And, rest assured, when political elites have power at their disposal, they always find a reason to exercise it.

It could be the “climate emergency” that justifies them blocking you from purchasing more than an allotted amount of gasoline. It could be the threat of “extremism” that justifies them from blocking you from purchasing certain books with “dangerous” ideas. And so on.

And having enjoyed a banner year in 2020, many politicians won’t need much of an excuse for another round of lockdowns and bans: Coming soon: Climate lockdowns?