Digital Money: Am I Taking it to the Extreme?
By: David Deschesne
Editor/Publisher, Fort Fairfield Journal
August 31, 2016
I was discussing debit and credit cards with our son, Robert the other day. We were talking about how so many people are addicted to using digital “money.” Where not too long ago plastic cards used to be used to purchase airline tickets and pay for hotel rooms, and perhaps gas on a long car trip, today they are used for every nickel and dime purchase from candy bars to soda. As an aside, the average 4 percent surcharge the card companies charge stores for processing a card transaction causes prices to be increased by at least that much so the bankers can reap unimaginable profits off the backs of unwitting card users; but, I digress.
The real gist of our conversation was where I said government loves us using digital money because it is so easy to control. It’s been said that government is going to outlaw cash one day in order to usher in the Biblical “Mark of the Beast” system. I submit government isn’t going to have to actually outlaw cash, society is voluntarily abandoning its use already by changing their purchasing habits from cash over to plastic.
In this conversation, I said that a day is coming when cash will be obsolete and the only way to pay for your purchases will be via a credit or debit card (or a microchip implanted in your hand, but that’s a topic for another day). When we get to that point it will be extremely easy for government to force compliance for all of its excessive fines, penalties, taxes and fees as well as its confiscatory taxation “laws.” For example, I told Robert, a day is coming when you will swipe your card for your groceries and *bam!* your card is denied because you’re late on paying your property taxes. Want to buy some gasoline so you can get to work? *bam!* denied because you have an unpaid parking ticket. At this point you will only have access to the money you earn (or the money government confiscates from others to give to you as “benefits”) at the pleasure of some faceless, unelected government bureaucrat from afar. Of course, government programs are consistently riddled with errors and inaccuracies, because governments are so horribly inept, so you might have no outstanding taxes or fees at all and a mistyped keystroke by some minimum-wage earning government flunky will shut you out of your account on a whim. Or, more malevolently, you could be denied access to your money because that government bureaucrat doesn’t agree with your political ideologies. Now try getting on the phone and ironing out those problems to get your account straightened out. If you thought dealing with the telephone company on problems with your account was difficult, you can be assured dealing with government is 1,000 times worse.
Robert then said I always take things to the extreme. I told him, no, I don’t take things to the extreme, government does; I’m merely a student of history and have studied governments and how they behave. My analysis of government control of this magnitude is merely an educated analysis based upon the observation of past government practices and motivations. Governments, composed of people and nowadays administered by international bankers, are compelled in one direction: greed. I told Robert that I have simply studied the map, I know where this road goes, and it is not a world any of us are going to want to live in.
Now, please bear with me as I take the previous example to the extreme because that is where all governments will ultimately take it.
You are at the grocery store checkout, trying to pay for the food you want to buy. Whether the digital money is in the form of a credit/debit card, or a welfare/food stamps EBT card, the results will be the same. You swipe your card and the card is denied because you have insufficient funds. You thought your paycheck was just electronically deposited, but the property tax bill that just came due was automatically withdrawn from your account by government, leaving you with a balance of zero dollars. No food for you!
How about that pepperoni pizza you’re trying to buy at the local restaurant? Since all of your health records are now tied to a government database, your card will be denied because your cholesterol is too high. Coffee? Nope, you’ve got high blood pressure. Gasoline? Nope, your vehicle inspection just came due (Furthermore, the OnStar system and others like it will lock you out of your vehicle and disable the ignition system).
Some government apologists will say these laws are on the books to “protect” us. May I please quote a former Fort Fairfield town manager, Dan Foster when he said, “You can’t legislate the risk out of living; and if you could, you wouldn’t be able to afford it.”
So, you think you will work your way around this system by using cash when your card doesn’t work. Sorry, at this point in time the stores you buy from are no longer set up with cash drawers to accept cash since it hasn’t been used for years. The only way you can pay is by swiping your card in the card reader. Sound like an attractive program? What about when the data links for the card readers go down? You have no outstanding parking tickets or property/income tax bills, nothing for government to shut off your account for because you’re being a good citizen (“good” meaning, compliant)—yet, the data link goes down from time to time due to malfunctions in the telecommunications backbone and the store will have no other way to process your purchase, so you and everyone else will have to go without.
But wait, there’s more! (Or, Cheer up, it gets worse!)
You figure since stores are not set up for cash, you will work your way around that by offering to barter or trade some of your products and services to the store owner in exchange for the things you need. If so, you instantly become a criminal—and that law has already been on the books since 2001. Do you remember 9/11? Do you remember the USA PATRIOT Act? Do you remember the expansion of the U.S. government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) as a part of that law? Oh, you didn’t even know such an organization existed, did you? Well, it does and the PATRIOT Act empowered them to “combat barter and trade systems” as well as other yet undefined “underground banking systems.”
The Federal Reserve bank is neither “federal” nor has any “reserves.” It is a private, for-profit banking consortium owned by around a dozen international banks who have been granted a monopoly on the U.S. money system by our government in 1913. Ever since, government has been using the power of law to enforce and prop up that monopoly power on this private, debt-based money system.
You thought the PATRIOT Act was just to be used to keep us safe from terrorists, didn’t you? In reality, that was a smoke and light show. The PATRIOT Act was always intended to be used against us, and it and FINCEN are the law right now. So, by the time cash goes away and you try to barter and trade your used snow tires for some pork and eggs, you will end up with a black SUV-driving federal government bureaucrat in your driveway ready to arrest you for participating in an “underground banking system.” Am I taking it to the extreme? Don’t blame me, I didn’t create FINCEN, or write the laws, this foreign-owned, occupational government did. Furthermore, from the top down the unelected bureaucrats will mindlessly and mechanically enforce its edicts against you and their own family because, “that’s their job.”
Extremist? Not me! Knowing this information, you would have to point the finger at the government at the State and Federal level and call them the extremists. We are in reality being governed by extremists whose only goal is to exploit our wealth, steal our money and control our lives. This has been done to the profit of the international bankers who have silently taken over control while society was busy swilling beer, watching football and listening to mainstream “news” organizations tell them this socialist utopia we are suffering under is the greatest idea the world has ever known.
Well, it’s only great if you’re a judge, politician or otherwise a power-hungry bureaucrat part of the system. If you’re just Joe Q Citizen, your job is to just shut up and let the government take everything from you and micromanage everything you say, do and think. Otherwise they will deem you a “terrorist” and hurl the entire mechanism of government against you in order to force your compliance and acquiescence.
“Society will never put up with that!” you might exclaim. Sorry, society is being taught to put up with that from Kindergarten through twelfth grade in government-run public schools across the Union right now. These poor kids of ours are being trained to accept these ideas as normal all the while being purposefully confused by public school administrators about something so basic, objective and fundamental as what gender they are. Do you think it’s an accident that many kids graduate from High School and go on to college who can’t read and write, do basic math without a calculator and otherwise exhibit no troubleshooting, critical thinking or problem solving skills? We have good teachers, they’re just busy following government mandates to teach the wrong things to our kids who will eventually grow up and vote in the system I just described. If a child today can add two numbers together in their head, they are considered “gifted and talented” by this system. Really.
This is a high tech, sophisticated form of slavery, but its idea is not new. It’s as old as the formation of governments to begin with. Any time you give a person, or group, unfettered control over the lives of others it will always tend towards corruption, greed and malice. Like an uncontrolled fire, it will end up consuming everything in its path.
Betty Acres, a columnist from www.lewrockwell.com once said, “it is the tendency of all governments to create gulags.” Look at every established government throughout history. Authoritarian regimes rise and then crumble due to inefficiency and the inability of the people to be strong, profitable and independent.
Governments create gulags. The United States has one of the highest prison populations in the world—a form of modern-day gulag, if you will. Many of these incarcerated people are victims of government social engineering programs that have been scientifically designed to cause a certain percentage of them to end up in prison building widgets for Federal Prison Industries, Inc (that’s a real company, I didn’t make it up).
Do you want to talk about extremists? Look no further than the Democrat and Republican candidates on the ballot this November. You elect them, and they’re happy to pass laws to fine, tax, penalize and incarcerate you in order to exploit and extract as much of your wealth as they can. If you’re one of those who don’t work and accept their government “benefits” then those radical extremists are all too happy to keep you on the government plantation with a subsistence income of government bread crumbs and convince you to never have any desire to better yourself or improve your lot. Once you give up using cash and convert your lifestyle over to all digital money, their exploitations and confiscations will become infinitely easier.
You will live under the level of oppression and slavery that you are willing to tolerate. That’s not extreme, that’s a fact.
