There are many strains of libertarianism, everything from Randians to liberaltarians, from minarchists to anarcho-capitalists.
I’m guessing the one thing they all have in common is a distrust of politicians and government.
Simply stated, we libertarians have noticed that slippery slopes are…well…slippery. When government gets a bit more power, they eventually wind up with a lot more power.
And that power then gets misused. Public Choice 101.
And this is why there is reflexive hostility to proposals for the Federal Reserve to adopt a digital currency.
Some of our friends on the left think such suspicion is absurd, or even downright crazy.
In her Washington Post column, Catherine Rampell accuses Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of being “looney” and “paranoid” because he recently spoke against the idea.
DeSantis can’t help but pivot from tangible, kitchen-table economic issues to bizarre culture-war concerns. And that’s where we get into looney-tunes territory. In a speech this past weekend in Pennsylvania, DeSantis suggested that the real reason to fear the Fed is that central bankers…”want the Fed to control a digital dollar,” he said. “Guess what’ll happen? They’re going to try to impose an ESG agenda through that. You go and use too much gas, they’re going to stop it. They’re not going to honor the transaction because you’ve already bought more than what they think. You wanna go buy a rifle, they’re going to say no, you have too many, too many of those, you can’t do it.” …DeSantis…appears to be invoking conspiracy theories that the left wants to eliminate physical cash… The Fed would then use that surveillance to control everyone’s lives, specifically to undermine the Second Amendment. …this is all so paranoid and untethered to reality that it’s almost like financial fan fiction.
It appears, however, that Ms. Rampell is the one untethered to reality.
She’s apparently unaware that many prominent voices on the left explicitly argue in favor of eliminating cash.
She’s also apparently unaware that politicians on the left already have tried to use the financial system to restrict the buying and selling of firearms.
Maybe I’m a bit old-fashioned, but it seems like bad journalism to accuse DeSantis of conspiracy-mongering when five minutes of basic research would show he was addressing a very real issue.
P.S. What happened in Canada also was not “financial fan fiction.”
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Image credit: nosheep | Pixabay License.
