Today's highlighted article comes from the American Thinker by J. B. Shurk and is a meditation on the frailty of the human condition in the face of tyrannical government. It is entitled Are We All Criminals?
Shurk paints a picture of national governments in the West replacing their fiat currency with central bank digital currency. The reason for going to digital currencies is to stop criminal activities. He asks the obvious question: Will this prevent criminals from their activities?
If the answer is, “No,” why not? Don’t human traffickers and international drug cartels depend upon a supply of paper currency that they can move back and forth across borders and launder through unrelated businesses for future use? If there were no money except for the digital ones and zeroes created and monitored by national governments, surely major criminal organizations would have no way to operate and nowhere to hide.
How could prostitution and corner drug sales survive within a system that traces all digital transactions in real time? How could black market trades in illicit commerce or between sanctioned nations continue if Western central banks actively surveil each digital dollar that changes hands? Surely the imposition of government-mandated digital currencies would usher in a more peaceful planet that is relatively free of crime…right?
If you’re still not convinced, let me suggest what might be tripping you up: your instincts tell you that criminals will find a way to skirt any future digital surveillance. Somehow, human ingenuity will succeed in creating effective workarounds to government-imposed central bank digital currencies. The sale of illegal narcotics, weapons, and other banned materials will continue around the world because, at the end of the day, humans adapt and overcome whatever obstacles stand in their way. Crime will continue to exist because criminals will continue to exist, and criminals will continue to exist because in every generation some faction of the human race behaves immorally, disregards social mores, or flat out refuses to obey.
The imposition of a digital currency where the government can and does track every purchase, every transfer, allows the government to tell you how and where and when to spend your money. You cannot make any transaction not approved by the government. If the government doesn't want to eat meat, you will not be able to buy it with digital currency. You see, then that to proceed you will necessarily become a criminal. If the government decides that your Christian faith is not approved, well tough luck making contributions to your church. Christians will see this as the mark of the beast from Revelation, where people cannot buy or sell without the mark of the beast.
An immoral law is no law at all — which is to say, whenever governments use the force of law to coerce citizens to do immoral things, moral citizens will choose to become “criminals.” This is more difficult than it sounds.
It is natural for people to overestimate their willingness to stand up to the State in matters of conscience. From the comfort of our armchairs, we often judge too harshly those who yielded to tyrants in the past because we cannot step faithfully into our ancestors’ shoes. We cannot accurately feel what they experienced as the coercive machinery of the State operated in their day. Would we have hidden Jews in our cellars while the Nazis were rounding them up to be murdered in camps? Would we have taken a strong stance against Japanese internment during WWII? Would we have opposed racial segregation laws in Brazil and the United States, caste oppression in India, or ethnic cleansing in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East? Many people would proudly say, “Yes.” Most would be sorely mistaken. Standing up to evil when it is backed by the authority of government offices and enforced by real human beings with guns and badges is no easy thing. Moral people too often balance an abundance of conviction with a scarcity of courage.
The question of moral courage becomes even more difficult when we ask ourselves what we would do in situations that don’t rise to the level of evil we associate with persecution and genocide. In 1933 President Roosevelt ordered Americans to hand over their gold savings. Although justified as a policy for fighting the worsening depression, critics warned that the action was nothing short of government-sanctioned robbery and would only increase inflation and exacerbate economic suffering. The critics were right, and a substantial number of Americans denounced the president’s order as entirely immoral. Still, most complied.
What would we do if the government came for our greenbacks, gold, silver, or bitcoin today? If the Federal Reserve and the Department of Treasury joined other Western central banks in making all digital currencies illegal except their own, would you comply? What if the FBI claimed that uncontrolled, decentralized currencies are used only by criminals who are most likely narco-terrorists and child sex-slavers? Would federal officials’ concerted efforts to use your morality and sense of shame as psychological weapons ultimately succeed? If the U.S. government used those same moral arguments to trash the Second Amendment and confiscate Americans’ firearms, would you hand over your weapons? What if all your favorite athletes, movie stars, and musicians told you 24/7 that we must disarm ourselves in order to “save the children”? Would you allow others to shame you into compliance?
I have to confess that during the "pandemic" my employer blackmailed me into getting at least one mRNA shot that proved useless. It starts small. The "vaccine" is safe. If you take it, you won't be able to pass it on or catch it. All three statements are lies, as it turns out. But now they have another piece of you. You have to think about these things ahead of time and determine where your line in the sand is.
Every act of compliance comes with two costs: we lose whatever liberty we freely hand over, and we invite further encroachment upon our liberty in the future. Loss of personal freedom is like a loose thread that gets only longer with time. Before you can repair the damage, you must make sure that your rights and liberties stop unraveling. There has to be a moment when people say, “Enough.”
In other words, there has to be a moment when citizens accept that the State sees them as common criminals. The price for speaking our minds will not stop with censorship. It will not stop with de-banking. It will not stop with professional blacklisting. It will not stop with the J6 political prisoners. It will not stop with all the Republican attorneys who have been disbarred and prosecuted for fighting election fraud. It will not stop with the DOJ’s efforts to imprison President Trump. It will not stop with all the servicemembers whose military careers came to an end because they refused to submit to the government’s experimental “vaccines.” Like a loose thread coming undone, the State will continue to yank at our freedoms until we are left naked. Only we can decide whether to remain so.
Because we have a choice, we don’t really fear that there is nothing that can be done about growing totalitarianism in the West. We are apprehensive about what will be required to thwart it. That’s a fine and prudent feeling to have, but it’s altogether different from the miserable dread of acquiescence. Knowing that a fight is coming and worrying about its costs do not reflect weakness. Nor does it matter whether an immoral government calls moral people, “criminals.” We’ll have to get over that.
Please read the entire article. It is important to consider where you will draw the line. What are your vulnerabilities. What preparations can you make now. For some things, whether Trump of Harris wins, we are screwed either way. Sadly, I think God will allow these things to happen because He wants us to rely on Him, and not our puny selves and our politics.
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