Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.
It’s official: Universal basic income will be the Trojan horse they use to replace the dollar with a government-run surveillance crypto-token, or central bank digital currency.
Last week, Thailand’s left-wing government announced a program to give free money to 50 million Thais with the catch that it will be in the form of a CBDC.
The program is large—$14 billion, which is equivalent to nearly $1 trillion in U.S. terms. But only if you join the borg.
I’ve been warning for years they would use free money or a universal basic income to impose a CBDC in the next recession. Using a CBDC’s ease of administration—after all, a bureaucrat can, at the touch of a button, give money to millions of people or take it from millions of people.
This would radically upgrade our totalitarian banking system—the one Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used against Canadian truckers—to surveil and control literally every dollar in existence.
That’s pretty bleak. And it looks like Thailand’s taking the plunge.
In case you’re unfamiliar, a CBDC is a government crypto-token that replaces the U.S. dollar with a system in which bureaucrats armed with machine learning can see every dollar you spend and even block your transactions if you’re buying the wrong thing or donating to the wrong people.
Fortunately, CBDCs are massively opposed by the American public. In a survey last year, the libertarian Cato Institute found that just 16% of Americans support a CBDC, while fully 74% oppose it.
Unfortunately, that’s where the gaslight-industrial complex comes in, using free money—universal basic income—as the bait.
Just last week, Silicon Valley tycoon Sam Altman released the results of his decade-long effort to sell a UBI by giving free money to people and tracking what they did next.
It turned out pretty much how you’d expect: People worked less, they saved less. In fact, the recipients of free money went deeper into debt. Their health didn’t improve, and their financial position actually got worse.
It pretty much washed right through them, replacing paid work with chilling on the couch with all that entails for one’s dead-end prospects.
Essentially, they gave up.
None of this should have been surprising. We’ve got plenty of natural experiments that people stop working when you give them free money, from trust-fund babies to permanent college students working on that second Ph.D. in gender studies to people quitting work immediately when they hit 65.
I was actually pleasantly surprised that Altman reported the results, warts and all. There are other UBI pilots running through universities like Stanford or NYU that, given left-wing bias, will amount to propaganda selling a UBI to voters that, as in Thailand, is begging to be run through a CBDC.
So what’s next?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries—including the U.S. and Canada—implemented UBI-style policies, from stimulus checks and the Paycheck Protection Program to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and the Canada Recovery Benefit. They’ve now cut their teeth and will be pushing hard next recession with an eye to making the handouts permanent.
I’d give it about two weeks between pushing the universal basic income and pushing CBDC to administer it. If they succeed, it would convert millions of Americans into permanent wards of the state while converting the dollar from an asset we own to the financial equivalent of COVID-19 lockdowns forever.
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