Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Friday signed legislation effectively banning any Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in the Sunshine State — a move he teased earlier this year.
Speaking from the Florida Public Safety Academy at Fort Myers Technical College, DeSantis laid out the latest legislation he is signing, aimed to protect the financial independence of Floridians as federal bureaucrats push the idea of a Central Bank Digital Currency or CBDC.
“This is something that Joe Biden announced, I think, last year, to say, hey — we need to study this, we need to see what would happen with CBDC [and] how that would work. And I don’t think they would have done that if they don’t intend on implementing this,” DeSantis said, explaining that CBDC would essentially be a “digital dollar” controlled entirely by the Fed. Because of that, the government would effectively be able to track where an individual’s money is going and control it as well.
“I think they want to crowd out and eliminate other types of digital assets like cryptocurrency because they can’t control that. So they don’t like that. Once they then have the ability to run a central bank digital currency, they’re going to be able to have the window into what you’re doing with the money and have the ability to control where that money is going,” DeSantis warned, explaining that faceless bureaucrats could hypothetically “block if you filled up your gas tank” in the name of fighting “global warming.”
“Maybe you bought a firearm last week [and] they don’t want you to buy another one this week. So that would empower the government to do, I think, a lot of things that would not be conducive to freedom,” he explained, making the case that one cannot trust the government’s reasons or claims on this issue, even if it claims its original intentions are pure.
“I think that anyone with their eyes open could see the dangers, that this type of an arrangement would mean for Americans who want to exercise their financial independence, and we’d like to be able to conduct business without having the government know every single transaction that they’re making in real time,” the governor continued, explaining that there was a movement among the states to add CBDC to their uniform commercial codes. That, however, will not happen in Florida.
“We are not going to be adding central bank digital currency to our Uniform Commercial Code. But we also said, you know what? We need to provide protections for Floridians against this. And so we’ll put in the Uniform Commercial Code, that is something we don’t recognize,” he said.
WATCH:
DeSantis added that if the administration tries to make CBDC a reality via “executive fiat, without having any legislative authorization,” this protection will “serve as an important bulwark against” it.