Imagine life in the near future.  A man resides alone in a tiny apartment.  He would prefer to be married, but the State considers that antiquated institution “patriarchal” and “white supremacist.”  He would prefer to have children, but he can’t afford them.  Besides, his yearly carbon allowance is insufficient to cover another resource-wasting human being.  

He has never owned anything.  He rents his bedroom, his furnishings, and his meager entertainments.  Each month, a digital account associated with his digital ID receives a number of central bank digital currency units.  How much he receives depends upon the number of hours he works at his government job, how much the government values his work, how much the government taxes him for the privilege of using public infrastructure, and how much of his income the government decides should be redistributed to other citizens in need.  After taxes, rents, utilities, and other assorted municipal, state, federal, and international fees are deducted from his earnings, he has little — if any — discretionary income.  

If he chooses to save that income to invest in his future, the government informs him that his central bank digital currency units disappear within ninety days.  If he tries to purchase something that the government has banned, he forfeits what he currently has.  If he does something that the government deems contrary to his well-being, his social credit score decreases, and a fraction of his discretionary income disappears.  Every few weeks, a digital doctor (running on artificial intelligence) appears on the video screen in his apartment with a detailed list of all the “unhealthy” things he has done since their last interaction.  He is informed that a portion of his temporary savings will be redistributed to citizens with healthier habits.  His A.I. health monitor tells him that he must immediately report to the closest pharmaceutical distribution center so that he can be injected with the latest “vaccines.”  Failure to do so will result in the deactivation of all electronic entertainment devices and a permanent mark on his social credit record.

He is unhappy, and because the State’s A.I. supervisor has detected his unhappiness, the display monitor in his apartment encourages him to find personal meaning by “joining the fight against global warming.”  For a while, he does just that.  He attends community meetings in his apartment building where government officials talk about the importance of “saving the planet” by “owning nothing.”  He chats with anonymous strangers (bots?) on the State’s social media platform, and they all agree that the sacrifices they’re making to save the world are definitely worth it.  He wakes up one morning to discover that his social credit score has risen and that he has been rewarded with a few extra central bank digital currency units.  Still, our future man remains unhappy.

Then one day sirens blare, and his apartment monitor flashes with breaking news: the country is at war.  He listens intently but can’t figure out which foreign nations are attacking.  The trusted news anchors tell him that peace, prosperity, and freedom are all at risk.  He steps outside his tiny apartment to find other solitary renters fired up and talking excitedly about the battles to come.  He walks back inside to find his A.I. supervisor informing him that he has been personally selected to protect the homeland from its enemies.  For the first time in many years, our future man feels alive.  

He soon finds himself in boot camp, where he enjoys regular exercise, discipline, and camaraderie.  Six months later, he and his new friends are shipped overseas.  Strangely, in all this time, nobody has explained whom they will actually be fighting.  All he knows is that they’re at war with “the authoritarians” who wish to “take our democracy.”  There is anticipation in his camp and endless talk of adventure.  Then, when everyone least expects it, a thunderous swarm of drones attacks from overhead.  Nobody has time to react.  Explosions seem to come from out of nowhere.  He sees the bodies of his friends torn to pieces.  Then everything goes dark.

He awakes in a hospital severely injured, is called a hero, and is later sent home.  When he arrives, he notices breadlines outside the government’s genetically engineered food distribution centers.  He hears a beggar on the street joke that they should call them “insect-lines,” since that’s all there is to eat.  He learns that someone else has moved into his old apartment, but he is offered a new one because of his military service.  It is smaller and has even fewer furnishings than the one he lost.  He realizes that most of his former neighbors never returned from war and that many of the newcomers now living in their apartments look and sound like those people he was told to fight overseas.  Nothing makes sense.  His injuries torment him.  He feels even more lost and lonely than before he went to war.  His A.I. supervisor informs him that he has been added to a list of people considered “potential domestic terrorists.”  Remaining on this list will make it hard for him to work and live.

Then, one day, his digital doctor asks if he would like some assistance in ending his life peacefully.  “You can save others,” he is told, “by permanently reducing your carbon footprint.”  In agony, he wonders, “How did we get here?”

The shortest answer to our future friend is this: governments abandoned sound money.  They replaced gold coins with paper currencies.  They made it illegal for ordinary citizens to conduct business freely and demanded that government-issued bills be used in economic transactions.  Then they gave private central banks the authority to print these paper bills whenever they determined that doing so would be good for the economy.  

Whose economy do wealthy central bankers protect — Wall Street’s or that of the working class?  Although putatively charged with financial duties to maximize employment and minimize inflation, central banks function as market manipulators and money printers for overspending governments.  By increasing the supply of paper currency, the price of consumer goods rises.  However, the numerical price of stock market shares also goes up.  These capital assets do not gain any real value, but their rising prices give the illusion of economic growth.  Many bad companies that would never survive in a free market become lucrative investment opportunities in fake markets.  Easy money sustains companies that produce no market value.  Who loses most in this artificial arrangement?  The poorest people who have no stocks and only limited cash savings.  They have watched the hundred-dollar bill hidden under their mattresses lose most of its value over the last fifty years.

Neither fiat currencies nor central banks have any functional place in free societies.  Governments that manipulate the value of money rig markets and steal from the working poor.  The wealthiest end up owning everything, while everyone else tries to balance life precariously on a tightrope of consumer debts, mortgages, long-term loans, and the growing prospect of insolvency.  This world that financial and political elites have built is unsustainable.  It is also a kind of economic slavery.

Because it is unsustainable, those who have benefited most from its creation will do anything they must to survive its collapse.  A crashing dollar does not matter if those who control the financial system today control the central bank digital currencies of tomorrow.  Gross inequality and rampant poverty do not matter if governments can convince unhappy citizens that climate change, disease, and war require them to own less and sacrifice more.  Growing public anger does not matter if those with armies can censor speech, throttle food supplies, foment wars, and imprison dissidents.  

Ponder this: how much of the story above seems foreign, and how much of it seems painfully familiar?  Your answer tells us just how much time we have left.

Image via Picryl.