The Biden Administration Wants to Control Your Money – with Justin Haskins: The Biden administration is moving to create a central bank digital currency that will phase out the paper dollar and replace it with an electronic currency that will be programmable by the government. If they don’t like how you spend your money, they can deny your transactions. Needless to say this is a dangerous direction the Biden administration is taking us down. What can we do? Justin Haskins from the Socialism Research Center at the Heartland Institute is on today to tell us about it and provide answers.

Air Date: 5/10/2023

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

Guest: Justin Haskins from the Socialism Research Center at the Heartland Institute

Heartland Institute

Stopping Socialism website

Transcript:

Rick Green
This is the intersection of faith and the culture. Thanks for listening to WallBuilders, today. You can learn more about us at our website WallBuilders.com . If you’re wondering where that word comes from, it’s a scripture in Nehemiah that says, arise and rebuild the walls, that we may no longer be a reproach. So we’re WallBuilders, we’re rebuilding the foundations, not necessarily walls, but foundations of this country the things that make a good culture that make a good society. What are the inputs that will give you the outputs that you really want to see in your neighborhood, your state and our nation? That’s what we’re about here. My name is Rick Green, I’m a former Texas legislator and America’s constitution coach with the privilege of serving here with David and Tim Barton. Tim Barton’s national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. David Barton is our founder and America’s premier historian, and just thankful to be able to be here with these guys. And thank you for listening, I hope that you’re learning a lot when you listen to WallBuilders. And hope you’re sharing it. You know, that’s one of the best things you can do as a force multiplier is to take the program and get it in the hands of as many people as you can. Our problems right now every… virtually everything we’re dealing with America, it comes from that civic and biblical ignorance. We don’t know truth, we’re not following truth, we’ve lost that morality, we don’t teach that truth. We don’t teach what you know, the civic side of what actually works. And so when you share the program, you’re helping to solve that. Ignorance is curable. Every time you put the program in somebody’s hands, they’re going to learn something about these foundational principles and learn something about what works in a good culture. So thank you, thank you for being a part of that. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for making donations. We’re, of course, a nonprofit, and your donations are what make it possible for us to do this. You can make that donation today WallBuilders.com . It can be a one time donation, maybe a monthly donation, whatever the Lord puts on your heart, we appreciate you coming alongside us and being a part of the solution. And I know a lot of you out there, because I hear from you all the time, you’re frustrated with what’s going on in the country. And you’re saying I want to help, but I need to know what to do. Well, listening right here to WallBuilders everyday, Monday through Friday, will give you lots of action steps. We give folks lots of things to do. So thanks so much for listening to WallBuilders. All right, David, and Tim, we got a special guest coming up later in the program, we’re going to be talking about some things we touched on last week. And it has to do with some of these, you know, digital currency and different ways that really world… Those folks that really like a one world order, they really love the World Economic Forum and all these international organizations, they love this stuff. But a lot of Americans are concerned about this. So before we get our guest on, let’s just kind of put that in the… put it all in that kind of context. I mean, how does this measure up against American values and how our system is designed, versus what a lot of other folks around the world would like to see. And now unfortunately, a lot of people in our own nation would like to see?

David Barton
Yeah, you know, this goes back to a Biblical debate that goes way back early in Genesis, when they got together to build the Tower of Babel. What you had was a group of people who wanted to live in close contact with each other and be increasingly urban. And God said, no, no, I want you all scattered out. I don’t want you to geting in these big corporate collective bodies together. And that’s what they were trying to do, is get a whole bunch of people together and have their big New York City or big Houston or whatever. And God said, no, no, I need you to spread out some. Now, it’s interesting to me, Founding Fathers, they specifically, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush, these guys said, Man, when you get a whole lot of people into one community and they call them the large cities, they talked about how the thinking changes, and the morals change, and the crime goes up and behavior is totally different. And when you can be more individualistic and more, more separate, and not part of the group, that you do a lot better, a lot healthier. And so there’s a lot of writings on this. But that’s really what’s happening in America today. There’s increasingly a group that wants to make us part of the collective. And we the government are going to make you all part of this new America. And we’re going to tell you how it works. And that’s the problem with the collective is it’s run from the top down, the individualistic stuff is run from the bottom up. It’s more about individuals. It’s more what the Founding Fathers believed that every individual has certain inalienable rights. Well, from their side, no you have the rights that we give you and the rights that are consistent with what we as government need. So we started seeing this with Obama back really about nine years ago, with the Copenhagen accords were that he went over in the World Economic Forum in Davos and said, Here’s what we need the world to do. We need to all collectively gather together and have these standards to guide all of us. And so they’re trying to make everything a little more centralized. And Obama has really kind of put this on steroids. He’s really taken off with this. As you look at Davos and WEF and others, they’ve really made it into a corporate kind of a thing. And I don’t mean corporate and business, I mean, join everybody together.

Tim Barton
And I just want to clarify, I think you meant Biden, although it could have been Obama, who was doing this. I mean, Freudian slip, right? This is kind of the third term for Obama under the Biden administration. It’s the same team, it’s the same group. So I will give you, you know… not take points off for that Freudian slip of it being basically the same administration. But this is the Biden administration. And this is Crazy Joe finally being unleashed to go the direction that President Obama arguably was promoting and wanting to go for a long time. And even Dad, as we have this conversation, it’s important for people to understand, because some people might be listening going why does it really matter? Why does it matter that America is independent? Why can’t we as a nation, as you know… join the rest of the world? And when we just have this universal standard? Why do we have to be different? That’s probably an important question to delve into a little bit.

David Barton
you know, and that’s something that is going with what Biden is doing with the global leaders, Davos, WEF. And they have these papers about… that talk about how that your… in just a few years, you will own nothing and love it. How do you own nothing love it? Because the government’s going to supply everything you need, you won’t have any of the worries about the ownership or the maintenance or the care. You won’t to have those decision to make. We’ll make those decisions for you. They have now come up in Europe with what they call 15 minute cities. And a 15 minute city means that we the government are putting everything you need within a 15 minute walk. You’ll be able to walk and get anything you need within 15 minutes. You don’t need vehicles, you don’t need cars, you don’t need transportation. We’ll make sure everything you need is within a 15 minute walk. And so they’ve got this thing going of trying to take away individualism. And part of that is the move that we now see going with digital currency. Now we’re being told, oh, we need digital currency because this stops counterfeiters. It stops the criminal element that is in the drug world. And now there’s lots of other ways to stop that. This movement toward a digital currency is more significantly, not toward a digital currency, is toward a programmable digital currency, where that the government is able to program what you can and can’t get through a digital currency. They can’t do that with you owning dollars. But they can do that if you have a digital currency that runs only through them. And they say, you know, Rick, you only need to buy gasoline from two to four o’clock on Thursday afternoon. And that’s all you need. They can program your currency to work nowhere, except where they said should work. And so that has become a very big thing in the United States this year, through what they call the Uniform Commercial Code.

Tim Barton
Well, it’s also worth, I mean, as we’re talking about this notion where we’re going to get into the central bank digital currency as part of the conversation we’re going to have with Justin, later in the program. But part of again, the reason this matters is, when people say we should be globalist, you know, just it’s one world, we should come together. Oh, like a one world order. We should just do this thing is if America did not have independence, if America didn’t have sovereignty, the world already would be in a very, very different place. Now, certainly, we’ve gone the wrong direction, in many respects, for decades. But if you go back, if America was not a sovereign, independent nation, explain to me how World War II might have worked out, right? If we look at even some of the influence we’ve had over the world in a positive way, in the last several decades, a free strong America has helped make a free strong world. Well, if there is no sovereign America, then we don’t have the opportunity to have that influence over the world. And I know that we’re oversimplifying, and there’s some nuance involved, I get it. But there’s a lot of danger in saying that you don’t want independent nations, we just want to be one global nation. And Dad, then to your point, one of the challenges and problems is if we are going to be one global world, and just one, you know, all the nations of the world becomes one nation, you begin to embrace the values of what that looks like. And we have seen the progressives for decades begin to push America in very negative ways and really kind of spoon feeding a lot of poison and bad philosophies that Americans unfortunately have been consuming over many decades. Where right now the majority of college students have favorable views of socialism. How in the world is that possible? We’ve been spoon feeding this poison for decades, in colleges and universities. And so now even the move, this notion, well, it would just be simpler to have a digital currency, right? It’s just it’s so much easier. And if it’s digital, we might as well make it programmable, so that we can fight the environment, we can fight, right, global warming and actually, we probably need to also be aware of all of the crime that’s happening. We can just take guns out of people’s hands, we wouldn’t have violent crime anymore. And all of these initiatives, the left have promoted for so long and haven’t been able to fully accomplish, if they are able to introduce a programmable digital currency… Some people might say, wait a second, but right, that doesn’t mean they’re going to programming incorrectly. If you have programmable currency, it’s only a question of who is in power. And if you get the wrong people in power, this is how dictators rise to power and how countries are changed forever. Because once dictators get power, they don’t give it back And if you create something like this, that this is what changes the nation forever. And if America is changed forever, the world is worse off, if America is not a free, independent nation, and a central bank digital currency that is programmable is a great danger that we should be staying away from.

Rick Green
And to educate us a little bit more on how that works and how it can be stopped, Justin Haskins is going to join us when we come back from the break. Stay with us Folks, you’re listening to WallBuilders.

Tim Barton
This is Tim Barton from WallBuilders with another moment from American history. America is a special and unique nation. The average length for a constitution in other countries is only 17 years, but we’ve had ours for over two centuries. And our 4% of the world’s population produces 24% of the world’s gross domestic product. And every year we produce more inventions and technology than the other 96% of the world combined. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville of France came to America, travelled the country, and in his famous book Democracy in America, reported, the position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional. And it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. This is the origin of the phrase American Exceptionalism and affirms that America is unique because of the distinctive ideas on which we had been based, including inalienable rights individuals and limited government and the importance of religion and morality. For more information about American exceptionalism, go to WallBuilders.com .

Rick Green
Welcome back to WallBuilders. Thanks for staying with us. Justin Haskins is with us from the Socialism Research Center at the Heartland Institute. Justin, thanks for coming on, man. Appreciate you coming on.

Justin Haskins
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be with you guys.

Rick Green
Well, I wish there was better news that we could get you on for but man, I’m so thankful for you bringing attention to what the Biden administration plans on, you know, it’s the old you won’t own anything, and you’ll love it, and you’ll be happy. But it’s also you won’t own money is your point in your article on Fox News. So talk to us a little bit about this. What are they planning and what do we do to stop it?

Justin Haskins
Right. Well, back in March of 2022, the Biden Administration released an executive order directing various parts of the federal government to issue reports about the development of a central bank digital currency. A central bank digital currency would be a completely new currency. It wouldn’t be a digital version of the existing US dollar. It would be a completely new kind of currency that would, at first, exist alongside the current paper based US dollar. But unlike that, that paper based dollar, this currency would be programmable, which means it could be… it would be traceable, it’d be trackable, it could be easily manipulated, controlled, it could… there could be rules set on what you could spend it and how often you could spend it. And it would affect every aspect of our economy related to interest rates, and the money supply and all kinds of just absolutely crazy things. And it would be designed according to the Biden administration’s own statements with financial inclusion and equity, and climate change, and environmental goals and all these other things embedded within it. And they’re working with key stakeholders to design this currency. Well, as terrifying as all of that is. And they’re currently still developing this, they’re still working on this plan along with the Federal Reserve. As terrifying as all that is, perhaps the most terrifying part of it, is that you wouldn’t actually own this currency. Technically, you might have control over an account with this currency, but you wouldn’t actually own it. And the reason for that is, even in the current banking system, when you go to the bank, and you deposit money in the bank, you don’t own that money. As soon as you deposit it in a bank account. The bank actually owns the money now. That’s why they don’t have to ask your permission when they lend it to someone else. So when, in a world though where, you can’t go to the bank and take your money out and then possess it and stick it in your pocket and put it under your mattress or put in your vault or whatever you want to do with it. You really can’t own it. It always, if it’s in digital form, it always has to exist inside of a bank account or directly with the Federal Reserve unless they let you download it onto some kind of a hard drive or something. But they have explicitly said that that really isn’t part of the equation. They are working on a programmable digital currency that would almost certainly exist either directly with the Fed or with an intermediary bank which means you wouldn’t own your own money.

Rick Green
I think of all the scary things you have just said. Well, I don’t know which one scares me the most or concerns me the most. I try not to operate out of fear but I… the whole idea of, as you said, the you know, the equity and everything else is we’ve already seen them use this in China and even in Canada, to control people’s money in order to control their behavior, to literally say we don’t like what you’re doing, therefore you don’t have access to your money. And that’s where this leads, right?

Justin Haskins
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think that there’s any doubt whatsoever that this is why they’re so interested in it. The idea that we need a central bank digital currency for the economy to operate smoothly makes no sense. Most financial transactions that exist currently exist digital, they’re already being done digitally. They’re already being done electronically, and quickly. There’s really no reason to have a central bank digital currency, other than because the government wants to have more control over how people spend their money. They want to see what people are spending their money on. They want to have more control over printing money, or in this case, just pushing a few keys on a keyboard and creating new money overnight. But the amount of power that this would give the federal government, even if they had the best of intentions, and I don’t believe they do. But even if they did, the amount of power that they would have is literally unprecedented in America. We’ve never seen anything quite like that. And the ramifications of it for everyday life, it would touch on, every single American would be impacted by this all across the country on a daily basis. And you can just imagine all of the crazy ways that the government could use this to help control behavior.

Rick Green
How did… Justin, where is… when we say they’re working on this, like, where is that happening? Like, who are the they? Right? We… you mentioned the fed, the Biden administration, is there a particular agency within the federal government? Like what, is there a committee in Congress that oversees this? I mean, where does this planning happen so that we know where to direct our opposition?

Justin Haskins
Right. Well, right now there is… So in September, a number of federal agencies in reaction to the executive order that Biden put out in March of 2022, released various reports on studies that they had done on central bank digital currencies, almost all of them were very favorable, talks about all the wonderful things that it could do, etc. In September, Biden directed the federal… directed a smaller number of federal agencies to create a working group with the Federal Reserve to help further design a potential central bank digital currency. They haven’t said they’re actually going to for sure, do it. But they, they’re clearly on that path. And so right now, you have the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury, and other top economic officials and people part of this working group that are working on the details of this, and the Federal Reserve itself, has been studying the issue of creating a central bank digital currency now for several years. And they have things like the Hamilton Project and other coordinated efforts with various nonprofits and with universities like MIT. So this has been in the works for a long time. But right now, I think the key players are officials from the White House, which are part of this working group, you have the Treasury Department, and you have the Federal Reserve, I would say those are the big players.

Rick Green
And even just, I mean, even just a study committee on a subject like this is dangerous in and of itself, just to have the conversation and say… and signal that they’re willing to do this opens the door, and then it gives them the foundation to then act upon. So incredibly, incredibly dangerous. And something that, I mean, honestly, we’re not paying attention to. Most people have no idea that this is a danger. They may see it as oh, it’s just convenient. It’s just convenient. And have… and don’t even realize the the control as you said. This would be unprecedent. And almost unlimited. I mean, if you control the money, if you control people’s ability to buy, anything from food to a luxury item, then you control them completely. And that’s essentially what they’re after here, it seems to me.

Justin Haskins
Yeah, I mean, that’s exactly right. And you could see how, in the name of say battling climate change, just use that one example, how you might design a central bank digital currency in such a way so that if the federal government or the Federal Reserve or something says, you know, what, we need to limit our CO2 emissions, we’re producing too much. So we’re going to put a cap on how much you can spend on gasoline each week. They could do that. And then when you go to the pump to pay with a central bank digital currency, it may not let you purely because it’s been… it can be designed, it can be programmed to prevent you from spending too much money on that thing. It can be designed so that money goes away. It leaves your bank account if you don’t spend it, or perhaps if you have too much of it and they want to increase equity. They can take money away. There’s all kinds of things that they could do and remember, you wouldn’t own the money. It actually was would not be your money. It would belong to the intermediary bank or the fed directly depending on how they design it. But almost certainly it would not be designed in a way that you would own it, which means a lot of the civil liberties that come with ownership would not exist in the case of a central bank digital currency.

Rick Green
Justin, I got to tell you, man, if we’d had this conversation three, four years ago, I would have listened to it and said, those guys are crazy. You know, they’re… they see a boogeyman behind every corner. Well, the boogeyman is here, and it’s real. And it’s, you know, it’s the old you know, difference between a conspiracy theory and reality is about six months right now. This stuff is happening, and it’s happening at a fast pace and really thankful for Heartland and what you guys are doing, to help bring attention to it. So really appreciate you coming on. Thank you for all that y’all are doing. Keep up the great work. And I guess heartland.org best places to send people to get on the email list to stay informed about this?

Justin Haskins
Right. Yeah, go to heartland.org and stoppingsocialism.com , which is another project of the Heartland Institute to learn more about central bank digital currencies and a whole bunch of other topics that we hit on on a daily basis.

Rick Green
Excellent. Well, I see my friend, Lauren Boebert, on your homepage, speaking at your conference a couple of months ago, out in Orlando. And so, you know, conferences throughout the year as well. Lots of ways to plug in. Folks, we’ll have those links today at our website. Justin,thanks, man. Let’s get you back soon.

Justin Haskins
Sounds great. Thanks so much for having me.

Rick Green
Stay with us, folks. We’ll be right back with David and Tim Barton.

Tim Barton
Hey, guys, we want to let you know about a new resource we have at WallBuilders called The American Story. For so many years, people have asked us to do a history book to help tell more of the story that’s just not known or not told today. And we would say very providentially in the midst of all of the new attacks coming out against America, whether it be from things like the 1619 project that say America is evil, and everything in America was built off slavery, which is certainly not true or things, like even the Black Lives Matter movement, the organization itself, not out the statement Black Lives Matter, but the organization that says we’re against everything that America was built on, and this is part of the Marxist ideology. There’s so many things attacking America. Well, is America worth defending? What is the true story of America? We actually have written and told that story starting with Christopher Columbus, going roughly through Abraham Lincoln, we tell the story of America not as the story of a perfect nation of a perfect people. But the story of how God used these imperfect people and did great things through this nation. It’s a story you want to check out, WallBuilders.com , The American Story.

Rick Green
We’re back here on WallBuilders. Thanks for staying with us. Thanks to Justin Haskins for joining us as well. And guys, like I told Justin and I tell people this all the time, when we start talking about these kinds of topics, you know, you just listen to this, if you don’t know anything about it, you start thinking wow, these people are crazy. This is some kind of conspiracy or they’re worried about a boogeyman behind every corner. But Tim, you nailed it before the interview. This is serious stuff. And it’s not like, we’re wondering if this could happen. We’ve watched it happen in China, we’ve seen a small taste of it in Canada, we know it can happen. And we know that there are people that are willing to do that. And y’all remember the poll during and COVID that said, it was more than 50% of Democrats said they would love for you to be locked up if you didn’t get the jab. If you weren’t willing to get the jab, you should be locked up in essentially a modern day concentration camp where you cannot harm anyone else, you know. And so we know there are people in this country that want to control your actions. And if they control your money, they can control you.

David Barton
And I think it’s really important, what Justin said is I don’t think most people recognize that when they put their money in a bank that is no longer their money. The bank has their money. And this is why we’ve been working on bills like on ESG to keep monies from, for example, the government monies, pensions, investments, etc., from being used by the banks to support ESG or Blackrock or Vanguard or all those guys. And it’s the same thing with your money. Once it goes in to that bank, they have that money, now they’re supposed to return it to you. They have an obligation to. And if they don’t, you have legal recourse. But if the government becomes your bank, and you don’t have a private community bank, and you have programmable currency that the government owns, how do you make the government return it to you? I mean that’s a whole different baileywick. And so moving into the situation of having programmable government currency as opposed to local currency, that’s been printed by the government, but you have it in your local banks and you can… you have ways to get it back out. That’s a whole different conversation most people have not thought about

Tim Barton
And not to minimize the important tool we’re talking about right now, but me and all of my millennial friends would like to know what is a baileywick? And why does it matter?

Rick Green
I was going to ask the same thing, Tim. So I’m glad you asked it, because I was literally typing in baileywick on my Merriam Webster Dictionary, so that I can see what David was going to end up saying, so David, what is baileywick?

David Barton
You typed it in, what did you find?

Rick Green
Alright, baileywick definition and meaning. It’s a middle… Lets see, wait, we’re here we go. Um, the office or jurisdiction of a bailiff… Nah, that can’t be it. The sphere in which one has superior knowledge or authority, a special domain and it comes from the Middle English word for bailiff. Okay, that’s the. So how’s it used culturally?

David Barton
So that’s the whole thing. That’s all of it. Yeah, the whole bailiwick. You get all.

Rick Green
You get all of it.

Tim Barton
A sphere of a topic or area. Okay, so that’s your bailiwick. Interesting. Well, me and my millennial friends, thank you for that. And then we will say that we do not want, I guess, is this right? We don’t want the Bailiwick of a central bank digital currency? Was that the correct usage? Or…

David Barton
That’s right, you don’t want everything that goes with it. You don’t want the central currency and all the stuff that goes with that sphere that domain everything with. You guys are so undereducated. I don’t know, man.

Rick Green
Okay, wait, I’m digging further here. I’ve got curious. So dig it further. Yeah. So it could also be in the dwelling place, or village. So it’s like you’re saying, it’s the whole thing. It’s kind of like the whole nine yards. Where did the whole nine yards come from? It’s not football. I thought it was football. And…

David Barton
It’s war. It’s war. That’s how long machinegun chain… A chain of machine gun bullets was nine yards long. And so if you give them the whole nine yards, shoot every bullet you’ve got it the enemy, all nine yards of that machine gun.

Rick Green
There you have it folks out there listening to WallBuilders, now you know when you come to WallBuilders, not only will you learn about the founding fathers, you’re going to learn what a baileywick is, the whole nine yards and all kinds of other great references so, you know, make sure you don’t miss a show. There’s no telling what you might have missed it could have learned that day. Thanks for listening today, folks. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders.