RFK Jr.’s Fight against Financial Authoritarianism Will Restore Liberty and Prosperity

By Adam Garrie, The Kennedy Beacon

By Adam Garrie, The Kennedy Beacon

One of the central principles of a free market economy is the ability of fellow citizens to transact with one another free from interference by third parties, including the government. Throughout history, numerous developments have posed challenges to this principle, but perhaps the most concerning is a concept known as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). 

The Federal Reserve refers to CBDCs as “a digital form of central bank money that is widely available to the general public.” Unlike gold, silver, or the fiat dollar, a CBDC is a digital token minted by a nation’s central bank that is capable of tracing every private transaction. 

Candidate Kennedy Standing Alone against CBDCs

Among the leading Republican, Democratic, and independent candidates in the 2024 presidential race, only Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has unambiguously come out in opposition to CBDCs. During an October interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Kennedy said, “I’m against central bank digital currencies. I think they will become an instrument of power and control. Ultimately, they will be used as an excuse to abolish cash currencies and give the government complete control over our lives.” 

Kennedy further warned that CBDCs are likely to be used by governments to punish citizens who do not behave in line with strict social diktats. He likened CBDCs to a highly sophisticated “vaccine passport” that would render individuals unable to spend the money they have earned because they refused to wear a mask or because they elected not to take a state-mandated vaccine. 

Kennedy’s opposition to CBDCs should not be confused with an attitude of monetary Luddism. Indeed, Kennedy is a foremost champion of cryptocurrencies. In May 2023, he said the following about crypto: 

Cryptocurrencies, led by bitcoin, along with other crypto technologies are a major innovation engine. It is a mistake for the U.S. government to hobble the industry and drive innovation elsewhere. Biden’s proposed 30% tax on cryptocurrency mining is a bad idea.… Some advocate tight control of cryptocurrencies to prevent their use by criminals. But it isn’t just criminals who want privacy. So do dissidents and ordinary citizens. Governments harass their enemies and crush dissent by controlling bank accounts and payment platforms. Until we restore trust in government (a distant prospect) we need cash and crypto to ensure freedom.

A true cryptocurrency is antithetical to CBDCs. While CBDCs put untethered monetary control in the hands of governments and secretive central banks, cryptocurrencies allow citizens to transact with one another in a manner that is free from centralized control and surveillance.

A Clear and Present Danger

The threat to individual liberty posed by CBDCs is no longer merely theoretical. The COVID-19 lockdowns highlighted governments’ readiness to curtail our freedoms of movement, economic exchange, religious worship, education, and even bodily autonomy. 

CBDCs threaten to take the illiberal principles of lockdowns and mandates to new depths as they break the transactional chain of custody as it is currently understood. At present, an employee receives a wage because his or her employer has agreed to pay a certain amount of money for a certain amount of work. Likewise, businesses agree to sell goods and services directly to consumers without requiring arbitration by a third party. CBDCs add governments and central banks to this transactional chain of custody. Given the latter entities’ behavior during the pandemic, Kennedy’s fears of CBDCs being used as tools of authoritarian social control are entirely logical.

Kennedy Says He’ll End the Corrupt Merger of State and Corporate Power

Revelations from the Twitter Files and the evidence presented in the landmark case Missouri v. Biden have made it clear that the federal government is all too willing to coerce social media companies into censoring the speech of American citizens. With CBDCs, governments could theoretically stop Americans from spending their own money because of their behavior, just as surely as the Biden administration was caught ordering the censorship of citizens like Kennedy himself for engaging in constitutionally protected speech.

Nigeria’s Experiment 

Where the CBDC experiment has been tried, it has already resulted in chaos. In 2021, Nigeria introduced a CBDC known as the eNaira. Although Nigerians are enthusiastic users of privately minted cryptocurrencies, the eNaira was immediately unpopular and remains so. According to CoinDesk, only 0.5% of Nigerians had used the CBDC one year after its introduction. 

Rather than respect a population that had self-evidently decided against a CBDC, coercive methods were introduced, including limits on how much cash one could withdraw from an ATM. This did not lead to widespread use of the CBDC, but instead bloated the underground economy. According to Dr. Peter St. Onge, “Now, the informal cash-based economy in Nigeria is an enormous share of output. It’s life or death for Nigeria’s 200 million people because it’s the only part outside government control, so it’s also the only part of Nigeria’s economy that actually works.”

Killing Off the Dollar

A long-term danger of CBDCs highlighted by Kennedy is that they could be used to end the dollar as we know it. A fiat currency is far from ideal, and a digital fiat only augments the problems inherent in such a system. A CBDC could allow the federal government and Federal Reserve to abolish the existing dollar and force the public to exchange dollars for redenominated digital dollars.

According to Investopedia, “When redenomination occurs, old banknotes and coins are typically taken out of circulation and a new currency is issued.” This dubious practice is famous for its failures to control inflation. After multiple redenomination efforts in Zimbabwe, the country’s leaders threw in the towel in July 2022 by issuing gold coins, as reported by Reuters. Similar problems were faced in Germany following the First World War. These problems began to ebb only when a gold-backed Reichsmark was introduced in 1924. 

Short of returning to a gold standard, a process that itself – were it to be attempted would have to be managed with supreme care – currency redenominations have historically made the majority of people poorer by prolonging the very inflation such a process supposedly intends to curtail. The introduction of a CBDC, if coupled with a likely redenomination, would trap the US in an inflationary spiral, which not only would create a Zimbabwean-style monetary black market domestically, but would end the dollar’s position as the international reserve currency.

RFK, Jr., and the Hope of Monetary Reform

Kennedy has acknowledged that the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency is already under threat due to a combination of economic mismanagement at home and the systemic alienation of would-be trading partners abroad, as a result of a warmongering foreign policy. Far from being an esoteric US-centric debate, the Kennedy Beacon’s Aaron Good recently explained how interventionist foreign policy not only contributes to declining living standards at home, but has galvanized many Asian, African and Latin American nations to begin concerted efforts to de-dollarize.

Flying Logos, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

His solution to the problem was explained in a July 2023 interview with Bitcoin Magazine. Kennedy said, “My plan would be to start very, very small, perhaps 1% of issued T-bills would be backed by hard currency, by gold, silver, platinum or bitcoin.” He continued, “Backing dollars and U.S. debt obligations with hard assets could help restore strength back to the dollar, rein in inflation and usher in a new era of American financial stability, peace and prosperity.” 

The death of the dollar would mean the end of US prosperity. Without the backing of a hard asset, America’s fiat currency would plunge in value, thus killing the purchasing power of a nation highly dependent on imports. Kennedy’s plan for the gradual introduction of hard assets to back the dollar and US debt obligations would give the world confidence in the dollar once again and bolster the purchasing power of Americans. 

This method, rather than the damaging interest-rate hikes of the Federal Reserve, is the clear path out of the inflation crisis created by the expansion of the money supply during the COVID lockdowns. Analysts at Nasdaq acknowledged this damaging policy in late 2021, putting the total cost of pandemic policies at $5.2 trillion. The total amount of money printed (inflationary currency expansion) was $13 trillion by the middle of 2021.

Economic Liberty 

Kennedy has defined himself as a free marketeer living in a country that has abandoned the principles of economic liberty. According to the presidential candidate, “We don’t have free market capitalism in this country. What we have is socialism for the super rich, and brutal capitalism for the poor.” 

The adoption of a CBDC poses grave dangers to the economic freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and clearly defined in the Bill of Rights. The surveillance state, the government’s insistence on censorship, and biomedical authoritarianism have wrought very real threats upon the liberty of all Americans. CBDCs, when added to the long list of illiberal measures already weighing down on the public, may represent the final chapter in the story of American freedom. 

Kennedy’s opposition to CBDCs is part of an economic agenda that eschews promises that are impossible to keep, in favor of a realistic plan to make life less expensive and therefore less painful for families and individuals squeezed by the inflation of the Biden years. Notably, the virtue of making life less expensive, rather than flooding the market with excessive fiat dollars, whose decreasing value fuels the cost of living, is a central plank of the Austrian school of economics. One of the Austrian school’s most well-known American proponents is former congressman Dr. Ron Paul. Like Paul, Kennedy has also acknowledged that the fiscal ruin caused by endless wars is a major factor behind growing poverty at home. As Paul explained in his book, The Case for Gold, the expenses related to the war in Vietnam were a major factor leading to the demise of the Bretton Woods system and the gold-backed dollar. 

Kennedy has likewise said that economic freedom is implicit to a broad restoration of the freedoms that have been chipped away by authoritarian policies implemented by irresponsible leaders. This is why he strongly supports the right to own and trade genuine cryptocurrencies as a hedge against the perfidious actions of central banks and politicians seeking a totalitarian magic wand to resolve the crisis of mass unaffordability. Kennedy’s realistic solutions offer monetary stabilization that can lower the CPI without resorting to extreme interest-rate hikes. 

While President Biden signed an executive order mandating the exploration of an American CBDC, Kennedy has made opposition to CBDCs a central element of his presidential platform. To put it bluntly, if you did not like the government telling you when you can leave your home, what you can post online, and what you must inject into your body, you will certainly not enjoy replacing the dollar in your pocket with a government-controlled digital asset.

Speaking recently at the North American Blockchain Summit, Kennedy reiterated the relationship between economic liberty and other forms of individual freedom. According to Kennedy, “It occurred to me at that point that transactional freedom was as critical a human right as the first amendment guarantee of freedom of expression. Because, if the government has the capacity to shut down your bank account and starve you to death and get you thrown out of your home and make it so you can’t feed your children, it has the capacity to make slaves of all of us. If there’s a guarantee of free expression but the government then can punish you for expressing yourself by robbing you of your bank account, what’s the purpose of the first amendment?”

Kennedy’s economic policies offer commonsense solutions to roll back the tide of poverty that is killing off the prosperity, comfort, and stability of working- and middle-class Americans. Kennedy’s solutions are based on a respect for the constitutional tradition of liberty, combined with a deep sense of empathy for the pain being felt across the country.