Imagine being paid in a ‘programmable’ currency that your employer (or government) decides cannot be spent on alcohol, meat, or fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, wealthier people get paid in ‘unrestricted’ currency.
Meanwhile, wealthier people get paid in ‘unrestricted’ currency.
I'd just as soon give everyone dollars via UBI
Christian Gelleri made this proposal to solve the Greek crisis: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3144910
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I actually prefer we give out UBI, in a tracked manner, as well.
"cash" they can spend on anything, but with data collection so we can do society improving retrospectives on how it was spent.
If there were political motive and will to implement such a system, it could be done without a CBDC and certainly without modernization of ACH (heh).
Conversely, if there's not political motive and will, then the presence of a CBDC doesn't change that fact.
Then you can enforce meat and fossil fuel rations with no way to buy yourself around it.
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.
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.
(I’m not in any way a climate denier, just a huge pessimist when it comes to attempted solutions)