Tom Emmer delivered the anti-central bank digital currency remarks to an audience at the Cato Institute in Washington, a libertarian think organization.
Congressman of the United States Tom Emmer says the introduction of programmable central bank digital money might compromise the financial privacy of American residents.
Emmer noted on March 9 at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., that the programmable CBDC could be “easily weaponized” as a surveillance tool to, among other things, “block out politically inconvenient behavior.”
“The concept of central bank digital currency has gained popularity inside the United States’ power structures as government-controlled programmable money that can easily be turned into a surveillance tool, as the federal government strives to preserve and increase the financial control to which it has become accustomed.
The congressman from Minnesota presented the CBDC Anti-Surveillance Act on February 22 to prevent the creation of the Digital Dollars Project, which has undergone significant changes in how it will be used since publishing the second edition of its white paper in mid-January.
Emmer claimed that the “ownership economy” allowed by blockchain “threatens” many Washington officials because it “restores economic authority to the people from centralized organizations.”
In its most recent discussion paper, the Federal Reserve emphasized that it would only issue the CBDC with “broad public and cross-governmental support.”
It also allows the CBDC to be program to suppress politically unfavorable behavior. Emmer also argued that decentralized cryptocurrencies could remedy the mismanagement of the U.S. monetary system and restore many of the “American values” that led to the nation’s emergence as an economic superpower in the 20th century — privacy, individual sovereignty, and free markets.
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