This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 19th, 2023.

I'm Caleb Brown.

America, don't build the next great firewall and don't make other moves to choke off the kind of

financial innovation that not only will help the US maintain leadership in that area

but also has the potential to undergird new and productive experiments in human flourishing.

Cato's Jack Solowie explains.

It is utterly baffling to me to hear some political leaders and some sort of

self-anointed pundits sort of look at what China has done in some areas, not all areas certainly, but to use the tools of China to control X or Y and just I don't know I guess they just wax poetic about the ability of a massive state to be able to achieve some end that they deem

valuable and I just can't imagine emulating China when it comes to limiting people's ability to engage with one another

as freely as possible.

I completely agree and it's

it should be hard to imagine, but unfortunately it has been the case that in the wake of the

FTX crack up, some of the ideas floated by lawmakers, by policymakers, have in some ways embraced

certain aspects of the infamous Chinese great firewall

approach to the global internet. So you have seen entertaining of the idea of potentially banning crypto, as impractical

as that might be.

You have seen from CFTC Chairman Rossin Benham discussing the

possibility even if impractical of potentially having the federal government use its authority to assist foreign

crypto exchanges in blocking American users by protecting their firewalls.

So really, I think what this demonstrates

is that instead of being a problematic technology,

the role of crypto in actually countering authoritarian abuses in China is evidence of its utility in a free and democratic state like the United States.

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