GOP presidential candidate and successful businessman Vivek Ramaswamy sounded the alarm on an impending threat to American’s liberty, a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Ramaswamy addressed CBDC while answering a question about the Federal Reserve during a Jan. 10 appearance on “Timcast IRL” with podcast host Tim Pool and The Daily Wire host Candace Owens. Ramaswamy told his audience that the digital currency “is a backdoor way of ensuring the government surveillance system of being able to wipe you out for doing something the government didn’t approve of.” He attributed CBDC’s existence to a Federal Reserve bureaucracy with too many staff members with not enough things to do. The candidate promised a “90 percent headcount reduction” at the Federal Reserve to do “that narrow function of pegging the dollar.”
Ramaswamy noted that the Chinse-Communist government has already adopted a CBDC and ripped apart the argument that the U.S. needs a CBDC to compete technologically. Ramaswamy warned that those who make that argument ignore the whole point of China’s CBDC. The communist Chinese government “want[s] to actually be able to exert monitoring and control and discipline of their own citizens. Its the ultimate manifestation of a social credit system,” he said.
According to Ramaswamy, the purpose of a CBDC in the West is primarily censorship. Ramaswamy compared the potential abuse of a CBDC to the Canadian government’s “weaponization of the financial system” against protesting truckers.
Both Pool and Owens were quick to supply examples of how a CBDC could expand government censorship and control in the U.S. Owens pointed out that in many ways the “digitization of everything” which took place during COVID-19 had continued after the pandemic. Owens said that she “felt it was very much because they did want us to move in this direction as a society.” Pool even suggested that a CBDC could expand social media censorship for unapproved opinions to restrictions on what you can buy.
Ramaswamy went further still, arguing that the government would use the CBDC to decrease Americans’ savings without due process for social media speech that offended the government. The candidate said that these fines would be small and “designed to change behaviors at the margin.”
Vivek finished by promising to “put the Kabosh on the CBDC” by executive action in the first month of his presidency.
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