This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 23rd,

2004. I'm Caleb Brown.

The more people learn about Central Bank digital currency,

the less they like it.

But that hasn't and likely won't stop efforts for the US to adopt some form of the privacy

killing technology.

Cato's Nick Anthony argues among the arguments presented on behalf of

CBDC's the one that stands out is literally impossible. Nick, let's recap a little bit because we've talked about Central Bank digital

currencies on a number of occasions, CBDCs, and the flawed, deeply flawed

rollouts of CBDCs in other countries thus far seemingly has not deterred those in the US and elsewhere

looking at potentially rolling out a CBDC. We've talked about the privacy

implications of CBDC's, the financial privacy implications, the fact that the government would be in some ways able to direct how money gets

spent and notably how it cannot be spent.

But there is one element here that you and our colleague Norbert Michelle have noted,

which is this weird claim that seems to undergird arguments on behalf of CBDCs,

and that is the notion of a level playing field.

Can you steelman this for us?

Give us the best version of the CBDC fanboys will call them, what they say when they talk about

a level playing field in terms of digital currencies?

Well, one of the benefits of my work here at Cato and my work with the Human Rights Foundation

maintaining the HRF CBDC tracker is that I can pull the best arguments from around the world

to try to build the best case here even though no individual cases is quite there and there's this

...