Guest Post: Freedom to Speak. Freedom to Transact.

Guest post by krazykiwi: —————————– Freedom of speech has its origins in ancient Greece (fifth century BC) when Pericles extolled the freedom to speak plainly and openly as being a key distinction between civilised Athenians and the military dictatorship of Sparta. Since then many civilisations have continued to promote freedom of speech with some key actors being Copernicus and Galileo vs the Vatican, John Milton’s essay Areopagitica (“Truth is most likely to emerge in a free and open encounter”), various human rights legislations – Sweden 1776, Norway 1770, French National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, and the US Constitution’s First Amendment in 1791. But despite noble intentions, even ancient Athens restricted speech. Solon was a prominent lawmaker, and he banned “speaking evil against the living and the dead”, then later the Athens Assembly sentenced Socrates to death for encouraging youth to question authority. No matter how newly under fire freedom of speech might appear today, it has always been in the crosshairs of authoritarians and tyrants. The powerful have never wanted their power and their exclusive control of the narrative challenged, and many of us have been bloodied and bruised by this battle over the past three years. Unperturbed, governments now pursue so-called ‘hate speech’ regulations in a thinly disguised attempt to mute any voices that dare to challenge their ascendency. While more and more of us are fighting this battle a new front is opening up. I posit that where freedom of speech is the right to freely exchange ideas, money is the right to freely exchange value. Physical money allows two parties to agree on terms of some exchange of value. No other party is wanted or needed. The transaction is free from external moderation. Put another way, money is principally a verb rather than a noun. As technology has improved, and notwithstanding fiat currency- the world’s slowest moving Ponzi scheme – we have learned to trust mostly well-regulated banks to act as an intermediary in our daily exchanges of value. We have recently seen examples of this trust being betrayed; Canadians sending money to support the freedom truckers found their bank accounts frozen by government diktat, and organisations like the UK Free Speech Union were financially crippled after the elites running PayPal decided they didn’t like the FSU freely expressing their views. These betrayals are timely and could perhaps serve as a canary in the coalmine now that the Bank of International Settlements, the WEF, and the central banks of all IMF-member countries are enthusiastically advancing Central Bank Digital Currencies. Our own Reserve Bank published a paper on CBDCs in 2018, and they have a dedicated advocacy page. The Reserve Bank also envisages a time when cash will no longer be required. Consider the harm done to civil discourse by bans on free speech. Now multiply this harm by 1000 to approximate how dangerous will be the replacement of cash with CBDCs. CBDCs are best viewed value tokens rather than money, and individuals will inevitably be told by central government where, how and with whom they may spend these, noting that tokens can be arbitrarily removed from the holder. The linkages to social credit scoring regimes should be as obvious as they are horrifying. No matter the benign-sounding early phases of CBDCs, if the last few years have taught us anything we should now know that freedom to exchange value will be appropriated by governments and latterly their controllers who have, across election cycles, proven themselves incapable of allowing citizens to live unfettered lives. Our Reserve Bank frames the CBDC discussion as being one about ‘Private Innovation’, gently suggesting that the perceived threats of private (aka non-state run) cryptocurrencies are best met by centralised digital currencies. Don’t be fooled. No historical instrument or ideology has posed such a grave threat to human liberty as does a state-controlled CDBC. We should reject the premise that any form of CBDC is needed, and I suggest we strongly resist any proposed implementation.