The idea that a monetary system can be centrally planned has about the same chance of success as centrally planned automobile manufacturing or farming. But that doesn’t stop Keynesians from insisting that things would be better if the central planners would only adopt their particular tweak-of-the-week.
A central bank digital currency theoretically allows for micro-targeting — perhaps by sector, perhaps by region, perhaps by socio-economic class — with real-time feedback, and that could be invaluable the next time the economy needs stimulating.
Stimulating, in this case, meaning ushering in yet another round of capital destruction.
What do you mean? This stuff worked great for the Soviets!
We’ve never had a currency yet that was corrupted and changed into a useless tool.
Inflation of our currency has been happening since it was produced as every year it purchasing power get less and less and even getting rid of our penny.
It used to be made from an actual material of trade from country to country in silver coins but they too would be bastardized by changing size or silver content in the coins.
Computerized systems are reliant on stable electricity and subject to manipulation in a multitude of fashions.
That’s why digital currencies are such a disaster in the making as they also need more electricity and you could loose everything when it’s on one device as others have demonstrated.
Our computer systems are reliant on proper materials that are in short supply and reliant on certain countries to get it from so computer chips and other components don’t last long and fail.
Our trying to go DC current vehicles in an AC current country is ripe with disasters in many areas. As vehicle fires from overheated wiring as well as needing a new Breaker Box in the house to take the added capacity and heavier wiring.
If it’s not in your hands, it doesn’t exist.
As our politicians said when they were pushing fiat currencies “we’ve moved beyond the primitive practice of basing our currency on precious metals”. LOL, and we bought into it.
As Babylon Bee put it in one of it’s best headlines “People Who Wrecked Worlds Economies Gather In Davos To Talk About How To Fix The Worlds Economies”
State sponsored digital currency will simply be manipulated for short-term purposes as much or more than regular currency. It’s no solution.
A digital currency coin is being tried in Miami.
https://www.axios.com/2022/05/20/miamicoin-drop-value-price
I think the title says it all – “The crypto-pocalypse comes for MiamiCoin” and the first few lines “has lost nearly all its value” etc.
But the mayor loves it.
Get rid of income tax and central planners and you will have runaway prosperity.
We desperately need Herbert’s BuSab.
Five million disgusted citizens would make a good base for such.
And “The Betrayed” will come around,those that realize they actually would have been better off,with zero Government Help.
Our new country..Open carry required for all voting citizens .
No government minion allowed possession of any deadly force..
One of the most effective opponents of a ‘centrally planned economy’ was Sir John Cowperthwaite, a civil servant in Hong Kong after WW2 who led a like-minded group that built Hong Kong into a world economic powerhouse. He strongly held that economic decisions should be made by people with skin-in-the-game, not unaccountable bureaucrats who went (to misapply a Churchill quote) “from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”, and never suffered any penalties for their own bad judgment, sloppy regulations and overreach. A few of his quotes:
“I regard education as a good thing. But we must still ask what a good thing costs, how much of it we can afford and who is going to pay for it.”
(on the general theme that the only fair tax is a tax somebody else pays,) “it is natural that Government intervention by way of subsidy should meet less opposition in the business world than intervention by way of regulation or tax.”
(he strongly opposed welfare-style intervention, holding instead that competition for labourers when the economy was booming tended to produce a better result than whatever the government would come-up with,) “I myself have no doubt in the past tended to appear to many to be more concerned with the creation of wealth than with its distribution. I must confess that there is a degree of truth in this, but to the extent that it is true, it has been because of my conviction that the rapid growth of the economy, and the pressure that comes with it on demand for labour, both produces a rapid and substantial redistribution of income directly of itself and also makes it possible to assist more generously those who are not, from misfortune temporary or permanent, sharing in the general advance. The history of our last fifteen years or so demonstrates this conclusively.”
(rather than borrow-and-spend, he desired to have a year’s revenue in the bank,) “I will not be proposing a course which has been under some public discussion recently — deficit financing. It is wholly inappropriate to our economic situation. In its least extreme form it is based on the theory that additional money generated by a Government deficit (and given currency, as necessary, by use of the printing press) will stimulate consumption and thereby production, in time to match the excess money with goods before real inflationary harm is done. Unfortunately we don’t, and can’t, produce more than a small fraction of what we consume, and increased consumption would merely mean increased imports without matching exports; and a severe balance of payment crisis, which would destroy Hong Kong’s credit and confidence in the Hong Kong dollar; and which we could not cure without coming close to ruining ourselves. Keynes was not writing with our situation in mind. In this hard world we have to earn before we spend.”
(not a fan of tax-dollars stimulating things like renewable energy and electric cars,) “What mystifies me is how he or any one else can determine what is a desirable type of industry such as should qualify for special assistance of this kind. In my own simple way I should have thought that a desirable industry was, almost by definition, one which could establish itself and thrive without special assistance in ordinary market conditions. Anything else suggests a degree of omniscience which I, at least, am not prepared to credit even the most expert with. I trust the commercial judgment only of those who are themselves taking the risks.”
Wikiquote has a bunch more; I invite all to peruse, and especially people named “Justin Trudeau” and “Chrystia Freeland”…
Centrally planned corruption.