| Despite democratic governments' foundational principles of individual freedom and limited government, there are growing concerns about their increasing control over citizens. Governments are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) for surveillance, such as facial recognition, advanced biometrics, and AI-powered data processing, enabling the profiling of citizens. A 2025 report by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists highlighted how the promise of AI for behavioral prediction fuels a "vicious cycle of surveillance," leading to potential abuses of power. |
Global Push for a Digital ID—and Its Threat to Freedom
by Doug Casey
Money is a primary manifestation of personal freedom. Money isn’t just an economic good; it’s a moral good. It represents the hours of your life you spent earning it, and all that you hope to provide for yourself and others in the future. It is, in effect, congealed or crystallized life.
Those who want to control other people —collectivists, statists, Marxists, the Woke, socialists, and the like— naturally want to limit the uses and the value of money. Enforcing the use of fiat currencies issued by central banks is the ideal way of doing that. It amounts to a giant fraud. But the average person stupidly accepts it as part of the cosmic firmament.
People have been told that in a democracy, they’re the rulers. In reality, democracy in today’s world is just mob rule dressed up in a coat and tie. It amounts to a secular religion, where the State is a god, and politicians are its priests. When it comes to financial matters, the public has become accustomed to doing what they’re told.
This is nothing new. Few remember that when Roosevelt confiscated gold in 1933, he used an Executive Order—the same vehicle that Obama, Biden, and Trump have been using for so many things today. You’d have thought that, almost a hundred years ago, Americans would have resisted the president’s wholesale theft. But they were already used to the Federal Reserve issuing currency, and the government collecting income tax. When ordered to turn in their gold, they acted like obedient little lambs.
The average American is even more supine and indoctrinated now than he was then. So I expect little resistance to digital currency, which will be a final nail in the coffin of economic freedom.
I’m not a religious person, but it may yet turn out that the New Testament, Revelation 13, is correct where it says: "He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."
That verse is quite predictive.
Governments would prefer everybody to be an employee. They don’t like entrepreneurs because they have too independent a mentality. Entrepreneurs and independently employed people are in a much better position to avoid or evade taxes and regulations. Employees have taxes extracted from their paycheck before they even see it. Then, when they file their tax return and get a refund for overpayment, they stupidly see it as a gift from the government.
Furthermore, big government likes big corporations partly because government employees can easily move laterally into a big corporation to cash in on favors done. This doesn’t happen with small entrepreneurial corporations. Only big corporations can act effectively in a highly politicized environment, because only big corporations can afford the lawyers and accountants to interpret the regulations, and subtly bribe the politicians to have laws passed in their favor.
Having every individual use a digital ID helps to pigeonhole them, make them less independent, and easier to control. In a bureaucratic world where everything is computerized, if you don’t have a number, you don’t exist.
Comments powered by CComment