Your employer doesn't pay you in food stamps, they pay you in money you can use to buy anything you need in the entire world.
The government provides coupons that allow you to buy food which is remediated to the seller in dollars. The authority and funding to provide that service is something that voters can impact or change.
These are very different things, not "that already exists" at all.
> they pay you in money you can use to buy anything you need in the entire world.
This is an primarily American phenomenon though and it's only really true because of the dominance of the US and US petrodollars over global society. It's probably not easy to spend Turkish lira in Madagascar, for example. Yes there are banks which will exchange approved currencies, but that's one step removed from being paid in a global global currency as you imply.
"Petrodollars" are completely unimportant. They just mean Saudi Arabia's financial reserves, and KSA is not a large country so it wouldn't matter if they abandoned the dollar. It already doesn't matter that we stopped Russia from trading in dollars.
If anyone ever mentions petrodollars, CBDC, or crypto to you, they are crazy and I recommend stealing their wallet. (Since they're into crypto they're used to it.)
The populist right's obsession with currency -- pointing fingers at state banks and currency systems and money lenders and so on -- is a product of their unwillingness to point fingers at real corporate sources of power & control in the world. In large part because they're sympathetic to them (or outright funded by them in some cases.)
At best this kind of stuff is a harmless ideological pressure release valve for a discontented middle class / small business / entrepreneurial layer squeezed from above (esp after COVID). At worst it veers into outright authoritarian & xenophobic politics and often blends in some anti-Semitism. Starts with rants about Bretton-Woods and the next thing you know you're hearing about the Rothschilds.
There was a whole wing of this stuff ascendant in the 1930s (in western Canada we had "Social Credit", for example) whose ideological purpose was to displace left wing populism and anti-capitalist politics with an explicitly pro-capitalist highly social conservative narrative which pinned blame for problems on "international banking" and, ultimately, Jewish people.
The latest flavour is obsessed with talk about "petrodollars" and cryptocurrency, and then you scratch a little and there's the face of Sergei Lavrov or Marie Le Pen hiding under the paint.
The world is f*cked and unjust but not for the reasons that these people go on about.
Shows where my brain was at yesterday - that was a pretty ill-formed comment. I regret including the term without a fuller understanding of what I was saying, however I reject the notion of being associated with racist populism for making a criticism of the oil-based economy.
That's fair, I was more riffing on parent's comment, buzzed on early morning coffee. Not calling you a fascist.
I do agree that the bulk of the foundation of the world's economy is constructed over the petroleum economy. Though I also don't think the nature of power in the world would change significantly if that were to be replaced with something else or if the nationality of the currency it is traded in were to change.
Remember the US is an oil exporter now. Most of this oil analysis stuff is leftover from the 2000s; it's also coming from overly materialist analysis of the Iraq War, where they assumed "this war is for Iraq oil" instead of the real answer which is literally "we invaded Iraq because we felt like it".
Honestly, if governments paid out all social benefits in a demurrage currency which they accept for tax payments, they would save a lot of money because the velocity and therefore fiscal multiplier of a demurrage currency is very high.
I mean if we're talking that level of societal breakdown they would just use the system we already have for tracking semi-restricted purchases which is scanning and reporting your government ID.
Then you can enforce meat and fossil fuel rations with no way to buy yourself around it.
Look at what happened with the Canadian protests and banking restrictions.
Many are concerned that cdbc will allow the gov to create carbon rations that are enforced by disallowing purchases. Cash is fungible while regulated digital currency isn't.
But how could something like a carbon ration possibly be implemented? They'd have to retrofit every PoS system in the nation to classify sales and tag payments with that information. This would already be possible using the existing settlement infrastructure, nothing unique to how a CBDC would work.
Plus, if the goal is to limit carbon emissioms, it's more of a liberal market-shaping attitude that mainstream economists have to simply tax carbon heavy activities rather than invent new and unpopular technological measures to force it to happen. Same applies to the fears about limiting meat consumption, etc.
Something along the lines of ‘We face a climate emergency that is even more serious than the Covid emergency, we have to do this, this is about saving lives’?
(I’m not in any way a climate denier, just a huge pessimist when it comes to attempted solutions)
You are already starting to pigeonhole people with your stereotype. I'm as liberal as they come and I find the thought of a CBDC to be an unimaginable Orwellian nightmare. A boot stamping on the face of civil liberties and privacy forever.
Maybe if our democracy wasn't broken this wouldn't be an issue. The government is supposed to be ran by us, but it's been taken over by bureaucrat cosmopolitans & multi-national corps who have a distinct will to power.
