Thailand Builds Central Bank Digital Currency Trojan Horse

Editor’s Note: This is a lightly edited transcription of the accompanying video by Professor Peter St. Onge.

It’s official: universal basic income will be the Trojan horse they use to replace the dollar with a government-controlled cryptotoken, or central bank digital currency.

Last week, Thailand’s leftist government announced a program that would give 50 million Thais free money. It is suspected that the money will be given in the form of a CBDC.

The program is big—$14 billion, or nearly $1 trillion in U.S. dollars. But only if you join the borg.

I’ve been warning for years that they’ll use free money or universal basic income to impose a CBDC in the next recession. By taking advantage of the ease of administering a CBDC — after all, a bureaucrat can give money to millions of people or take it away from millions of people with the touch of a button.

This would radically modernize our totalitarian banking system — the same one Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used against Canadian truck drivers — by allowing surveillance and control of literally every dollar in existence.

It’s pretty grim. And it looks like Thailand is taking a risk.

In case you didn’t know, a CBDC is a government-issued crypto token that replaces the U.S. dollar with a system where bureaucrats armed with machine learning technology can see every dollar you spend and even block your transactions if you buy the wrong thing or donate to the wrong people.

Fortunately, CBDCs are massively opposed by the American public. A poll last year by the libertarian Cato Institute found that only 16% of Americans support CBDCs, while 74% oppose them.

Unfortunately, this is where the gaslighting industrial complex comes in, using free money – universal basic income – as bait.

Just a week ago, Silicon Valley tycoon Sam Altman released the results of his decade-long effort to sell basic income by giving people free money and tracking their subsequent activities.

The outcome was more or less as you might expect: people worked less, saved less. In fact, the recipients of free money ended up in even greater debt. Their health did not improve, and their financial situation actually worsened.

They have practically bypassed this, swapping paid work for relaxing on the couch with all its consequences, hidden from hopeless prospects.

They basically gave up.

None of this should be surprising. We have plenty of natural experiments in which people stop working when you give them free money, from trust fund babies to steady college students working on their second PhD in gender studies to people quitting their jobs as soon as they turn 65.

I was pleasantly surprised that Altman gave the results, with all the pros and cons. There are other UBI pilots underway at universities like Stanford and NYU that, given leftist bias, will amount to propaganda selling UBI to voters that, like in Thailand, beg to be done via a CBDC.

So what’s next?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries — including the U.S. and Canada — implemented UBI-style policies, from stimulus checks and the Paycheck Protection Program to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and Canada Recovery Benefit. They’ve gotten the hang of it now and will push hard in the next recession, with the expectation that the benefits will be permanent.

I would give about two weeks between the introduction of a universal basic income and getting a CBDC to administer it. If they succeed, millions of Americans will become permanent wards of the state, and the dollar of assets we own will be converted into the financial equivalent of COVID-19 lockdowns forever.

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