You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New Financial World Order and How to Fight Back

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my husband and best friend, Kurt.

This book is likewise dedicated to everyone fighting for individual rights, freedoms, and the pursuit of the American Dream.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction: The Coming War

Chapter 1: Socially Unacceptable: How Social Credit Leads to Owning You

Chapter 2: A New Financial World Order, Part I: Debt Begets Desperation Begets Disorder

Chapter 3: A New Financial World Order, Part II: The Enemy Forces

Chapter 4: The Incredible Shrinking Dollar: Killing Your Wealth by Debasing the Currency

Chapter 5: Digital Dollar Destitution: How Central Bank Digital Currencies Control You and Your Wealth

Chapter 6: The Technocracy and Digital Rights: In a Digital World, You Are the Product

Chapter 7: Socially Unacceptable, the Business Edition: How ESG Is a Power and Money Grab via Business Social Credit

Chapter 8: Renting the American Dream: Putting Housing Out of Reach for the Masses

Chapter 9: Worthless Paper: How the Government’s Predatory Education Lending Creates Indentured Servants

Chapter 10: The Upcoming Wealth Heist: The Government’s Plan for the Biggest Wealth Transfer in History

Chapter 11: Own Everything: The Battle to Take Back Your Wealth

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Also by Carol Roth

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

The Coming War

There’s a war coming. A global war. You may be thinking about World War III—which, at the time of this writing, hangs in the balance with a certain probability—but I am talking about a different war. This is World War F—a financial world war where you are F’d.

Historically, war has come about in a quest not just for control over another country and its people, but also to overtake their economic resources. War is always economically rooted in some manner, and World War F, in that sense, is no different.

War is also often an outgrowth of desperation. It’s a last-ditch effort to cling to power or an attempt to cover up for political, social, or economic breakdowns in the land of the aggressor.

World War F, though, is a modern and unique war. It is not a quest to dominate the American government, but for the government and other related forces to dominate you.

Today there is a late-stage, empire-driven attempt to hold on to power. Multiple forces are working to that end and to set up the elite on top for what’s ahead: the new financial world order.

These three forces are:

Direct government and government-related forces (think Congress and the Federal Reserve);

Bad actors and elite power-grabbers (think the World Economic Forum and big business); and

Big Tech (think Big Tech).

Individually, any one of these forces would be bad and create a challenging fight. Having them come at us all at once is an all-out major war. Sometimes these entities are working solo, and sometimes they are working together, but their goal is consistent: separating you from your property rights, money, wealth, and other freedoms.

These forces see themselves as the founding fathers of the new financial world order, but they are without a moral compass or a set of principles. They operate on the lowest rungs of human nature and desires: greed, power, and control.

They are working on a revolution against you in a war that uses a broad array of tactics, trying to usurp and dominate your wealth and freedom. Whether it be the government, financial powerhouses, international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), Big Tech, or other powerful entities, they are all prepping and building their forces. They have sophisticated propaganda machines and armies of soldiers they have enlisted, often under false pretenses. They operate on a global scale, sometimes using special forces or even Trojan horses to execute their strategies.

These forces, in different but related ways, are coming for your wealth. They are coming after your livelihood, aka your path to wealth. They are coming after your social standing and access, aka the opportunities for you to create wealth. And, most directly, they are coming after your assets, which is your literal wealth, as well as your legacy and your family’s future.

These three forces are bringing about and jockeying to capitalize upon a new financial world order—one with new schemes and innovative technologies that allow fewer opportunities for you. You will need to have the knowledge and the will to fight in order to hold on to the American Dream.

This is a book about what happens when the wealthy and powerful realize the financial stakes are shifting. They could sit back and see how it all plays out. Or they could proactively try to control every finite resource and who has access to such resources.

You need to get battle ready.

You Will Own Nothing

Wealth comes from ownership.

Being involved in the financial industry for nearly thirty years, and spending the past dozen-plus years in the media helping people create economic freedom and wealth for themselves and their families, I know that wealth being derived from ownership is an indisputable truth. More concretely, wealth comes from the ownership of assets that increase in value over time.

Ownership is a subject people tend to greatly misunderstand. We misconstrue where wealth comes from, and we misinterpret the benefits of hard work and taking risks. You can meet a poor construction worker putting in eighty hours a week for someone else. You can find professional athletes declaring bankruptcy as soon as their multimillion-dollar contracts end. And you can find guys sailing their boats who haven’t been to an office in years. That’s because it’s not just how much money you make, but how you manage it and put it to work for you.

Asset ownership provides the ability for people to increase their wealth exponentially—by several multiples of the original investment. This is something that working and earning alone cannot do.

For many Americans, creating generational wealth has come from owning homes that have appreciated in value. Some individuals hold stock and other financial instruments via brokerage accounts and 401(k) plans that have largely increased in value over time. Millions of Americans have built businesses that meet the wants and needs of customers and have created wealth through that process. Others have invested in alternative scarce assets, whether they be precious metals, art, or even trading cards.

So, if there was an institutional, governmental desire for more people to become wealthy and grow that wealth, making it easier to invest and gain ownership would be a priority.

Today’s reality is the polar opposite. Ownership—and the opportunities for individual wealth creation and economic freedom that come with it—is under attack.

I am known as someone with a commonsense approach to just about everything, so when I first heard that the World Economic Forum (WEF), an international organization connected to a cadre of elites that includes business, financial, and political leaders, put out a set of predictions for this decade that included the disappearance of ownership, I figured it was a conspiracy theory.

The WEF has courted, developed, and associated with business magnates and political heavyweights like Bill Gates, Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and former chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel. The WEF hosts a fancy networking forum in Davos, Switzerland, yearly. They put out thought leadership around social, political, business, and economic concepts. Surely there must have been some mistake that this organization littered with the global elite would be predicting the end of private property?

It didn’t take much research to find that it was right out in the open. The WEF’s 2030 predictions included the stark warning, under the guise of sunshine and rainbows, You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. And that’s just the beginning.

Yes, property rights and the ownership they convey, the cornerstone of freedom and wealth creation opportunities, have come under fire. And I am quite certain that owning nothing and being devoid of the opportunities that come with ownership makes you poor and unfree, not . . . happy.

What is being said by the elites aloud worldwide is playing out in real time in the US. But why?

Shifting Toward a New Financial World Order

This brings us back to the war and why you have become the enemy. Everyone, including your own government, wants what you have. More accurately, they are in desperate need of what you have—your wealth, both today and in the future.

These allied forces are on a quest to take your wealth and, by extension, your freedoms for their benefit, their prosperity, and, ultimately, their survival. Without it, their very existence is threatened.

Over the year following the March 2020 Covid lockdowns and mandates, we saw the most historic wealth transfer of all time, enabled by the US government and the Federal Reserve, alongside connected financial institutions. That multitrillion-dollar transfer went from Main Street to Wall Street. The already wealthy and well-connected saw their wealth inflated at the expense of average Americans, including savers and retirees, as well as the backbone of the US economy, small business. The coordination of the big players in the financial sector along with the government has benefited the wealthiest at your expense.

On the tail end of this giveaway, quite predictably, the highest inflation in forty years took hold. Once again, those who had the least bore the brunt of this burden. Then, two years later, the same central planning powers extracted trillions of dollars from the stock market, including from 401(k)s and other individual retirement accounts.

Some stories, facts, and injustices in this book, like the above, will be familiar to you; others will be new and shocking. Hopefully, though, you will begin to see it all in a new light.

These represent just a few battles in a much larger, coordinated, and dangerous endeavor. It is all part of a multipronged shift toward a new financial world order where they own everything and you own nothing.

As we work through the shifting pieces of the world economy and the new financial world order, we’ll be looking at two underlying trends. The first is the modern drivers of wealth. The elite know where the valuable resources are in the world and where new value can be created, extracted, or conquered. They know who holds wealth today and where they can get it from in the future. And they know how they plan to take every penny of it that they can.

Debt and Desperation

When the Constitution and Bill of Rights were framed in the eighteenth century, America was primarily an agrarian society. Property rights and the wealth that you could create were heavily tied to land ownership.

Then, as industry advanced and the monetary system evolved, individuals were able to build businesses and create wealth via investment.

Americans prospered through hard work, ingenuity, thriftiness, and risk-taking, all enhanced and protected by the founding concepts of individual rights, including property rights.

As Americans leveraged their work ethic and the structure that protected their fruitfulness, they became increasingly prosperous—at levels not seen anywhere around the globe at any time in history. Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2022 estimated global wealth at around $463.6 trillion, with 31 percent of that, or around $145.8 trillion, in the hands of Americans.¹

However, those in charge of safeguarding individual rights—the government—were derelict in their duties. They realized that to take and hold power, they had to make promises and offer services. Services that, by the way, they weren’t paying for—you were.

This led to massive increases in spending. As the government spent, given that government doesn’t produce anything of intrinsic value, there were only so many ways to pay for that spending.

Of course, one source of financing government spending is taxation—the taking of a portion of your productivity and wealth.

Another financing route is debt. This leads us to the book’s second, deeper issue: the shifting of the financial world order because of the natural opposition between power and too much debt. Debt isn’t always bad. It can be a powerful investment tool if used to build something worth far more than the debt in the future. But, increasingly, people owe money on things that have little monetary value, and companies and governments owe money to companies and governments that owe even more money.

The US government can’t afford all its spending and has turned time and again to debt as its source of financing (running upwards of $31 trillion, outpacing the GDP, and rapidly growing at the time of writing). Debt isn’t a magic payment source because it eventually still needs to be paid. This is ultimately paid from—you guessed it—your productivity. It starts with more taxes to pay for the interest on the debt, making you pay additional money toward services you effectively have already purchased by government proxy.

When the government runs out of people who are interested in buying their debt, then they pull an accounting trick and buy (aka monetize) their own debt. By doing so, it again robs your productivity via debasing the dollars that are a proxy for that productivity.

Government could, of course, cut services, but that would threaten its power. Moreover, as everything is done on your dime, why would they choose this route?

They could also take the wealth and riches of other countries and people via invasions, something that isn’t popular, for obvious reasons. It’s more stealthy and genteel to rob and plunder legally.

This works for a while, as people go along with the scheme or perhaps don’t notice what is going on.

But at some point, the financial scheme starts to show cracks. Debt levels get too high. Neither investors nor other countries want to buy new debt. It becomes incredibly costly to service the substantial amount of existing debt. The monetization scheme produces noticeable damage via inflation. Everything starts to unravel—including the financial empire itself.

I will say it again: power and massive debt loads are at odds with each other.

It becomes mathematically impossible for the current trajectory to be sustained. That’s where the desperation kicks in. And new and robust schemes are hatched as a way to continue this spending cycle and protect their power.

The government is desperate and in debt, and you and your fellow citizens represent a massive amount of wealth to be legally conquered.

As the US’s financial empire is in its twilight, with the government’s behaviors threatening the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, you are at even more risk of owning nothing. The Federal Reserve’s policies are greatly impacting the soundness of your money and its global financial standing. This ultimately impacts your wealth creation opportunities as well. You may hold dollars, but they are buying you less and less.

That leads us to where we are today. Many people see where we are in the broader financial cycle and where this is going. The elite and well-connected know that the economic reality isn’t sustainable and that it will lead to a new financial world order, as has been the case numerous times throughout history. They have studied it and they want to capitalize upon it.

So, with this knowledge, and the power, wealth, and connections to make it happen, the elite are posturing and positioning. They want to influence, create, dictate, and, most importantly, come out on top in this new financial world order.

That’s why they are working, often in alliance, together against you. To ensure that you own nothing, because that means they own as much as possible of everything as a global financial reset happens.

With that, in a postindustrial digital age, between fiat currency, technology, and elite central planning, it is becoming harder than ever to secure and maintain ownership of anything.

You work hard. You save. You invest. You do all the right things, but you still find that you aren’t able to get ahead. You know that there’s something wrong, but you aren’t exactly sure how it all comes together and how you can fight back.

The Counter-revolution

The time is now to create a counter-revolution to these forces.

It is more clear than ever that as a new financial world order takes shape, the American Dream is under fire and may soon be unattainable. The intention is to hollow out the middle and working class and leave them with nothing. It’s being done via the encroachment of government, Big Tech, big finance, and other ruling elite into all aspects of your life.

In this book I will share with you where these property rights and wealth creation opportunities are being stymied, the tactics being used to do so, and how you can fight back. You may be tempted to skip ahead and just look for the solutions, but I beg of you to read this all carefully. Understanding what is happening is a critical component of being able to secure your and your family’s wealth for the future and ultimately win this war. Your rights, your privacy, and ultimately your wealth hang in the balance.

Chapter 1

Socially Unacceptable

How Social Credit Leads to Owning You

During the spring and summer of 2020, every evening when the clock struck 7 p.m., something special happened. People across the US, especially in big cities, headed to their windows and began clapping and cheering. Some people flickered the lights in their homes on and off, and others festively hooted and hollered, all meant to show appreciation and support to frontline workers. The workers being celebrated included nurses, doctors, and other medical staff who worked in hospitals and medical facilities, many of which were at capacity because of the increase of Covid patients.¹

Jenny was one of those frontline workers. Although not directly working with Covid patients, she worked through the pandemic performing her job with vulnerable individuals—an essential worker, as deemed by government mandate. A registered nurse for twenty-one years, during the pandemic Jenny worked as an RN in an inpatient drug rehabilitation and recovery center, as well as responding as a forensic nurse examiner in an emergency room doing evidence collection and examination related to sexual assault cases.²

The hospital where she was working in that latter capacity was the first of her two jobs to put in place a Covid vaccine mandate. Jenny applied for a religious exemption and appeared in front of a board that asked questions about her faith and why she didn’t want to take a Covid vaccine. A short while later, she received an email that said her request for an exemption was denied. It further said that she had a week to comply and receive the vaccine or else she would be terminated from her job.³

Despite already having had Covid, which she was exposed to while working, making a full recovery, and having antibodies to confer what she believed to be natural immunity, this hero was no longer treated as such. She was cast aside and lost her employment.⁴

Jenny was far from the only frontline worker to lose her job. In September 2021, President Joe Biden issued a vaccine executive order related to all federal employees, as well as larger employers.⁵ It required all federal employees to take the vaccine, and all employees of companies with more than one hundred workers to get vaccinated, submit to weekly Covid testing, or lose their job.⁶ With that, all kinds of frontline workers went from being put on a pedestal to being knocked to the ground.

On top of that, experts said that in most cases, individuals who lost their job for refusing would not be able to claim unemployment benefits, either.⁷

In the weeks and months that followed, all kinds of businesses, with the push from government mandates, fired the noncompliant. The Mayo Clinic fired seven hundred unvaccinated employees.⁸ The city of New York fired more than 1,400 employees, including thirty-six policemen with the NYPD.⁹ Individuals in a variety of private jobs, including many who had been working nonstop during the pandemic, lost their jobs.

The pressure from the White House came not only with potential job loss for individuals but also with threats to businesses. For example, with hospitals and medical facilities, if they didn’t have a mandate, they would lose access to government Medicare and Medicaid funding, effectively weaponizing health care.¹⁰

The government pressured businesses and used virtue-signaling supporters, deciding that the very people who had been previously labeled heroic and who kept themselves and others safe for well over a year now had to be punished for noncompliance with this government mandate.

The punishment for noncompliance was taking away people’s livelihoods, the ultimate bullying control tactic. And that punishment was aimed at the same people who were pushed to work while others stayed home for months on end.

If you can’t earn a living, how are you supposed to live?

Even if you could find another job, government mandates were separating people from their passions and expertise. In addition to arenas already discussed like the police force, the Military Times reported in April 2022 on 3,400 troops who were involuntarily separated from military service.¹¹ In July 2022, Military.com reported, Some 40,000 National Guard and 22,000 Reserve soldiers who refused to be vaccinated against Covid-19 are no longer allowed to participate in their military duties, also effectively cutting them off from some of their military benefits.¹² At a time when the police and military were struggling with recruitment, willing servicemen and -women, those who may have dreamed their whole lives and trained extensively for this specialized expertise, were separated from their careers and callings.

While many of Biden’s private mandates were eventually shut down, with judges agreeing the government exceeded its authority (at least those for private businesses, with others remaining), the die was cast. Businesses didn’t want to run afoul of other rules. Workers had already lost their livelihoods and developed animosity toward their employers.¹³ Other mandates remained in place for health care workers and federal employees.

It might not have been called social credit, but if it walks like social credit and talks like social credit, it might just be the foundation of it.

Your social standing and your livelihood are the core of your opportunities and path to create wealth. If you are not aligned with the elite, you will find that social credit, whether or not formalized into a system, puts this wealth creation path and its outcomes at risk.

The Short Road from Social Acceptance to Social Credit

There’s a fairly straight and certainly disturbing line that goes from social acceptance to a social credit system. It stems from the type of tribal approval mechanism that either embraces you or rejects you as part of a group. Do you support the current thing? If you do, you can put up an emoji in your social media biography or a ribbon on your profile picture and a sign in front of your house. You can signal that you are a virtuous and worthy moral being. You are deemed by your peers and the mainstream media as a good citizen and part of the crowd of right think instead of wrongthink.

If you don’t support the current thing or, worse, you speak out about it, you may be rejected by others in society. God forbid you wear a hat or a T-shirt with a slogan that identifies you as outside of right think or you don’t wear a cloth mask to the grocery store; if so, you may be subject to a verbal haranguing in public. Worse, if a human resources manager combs your social media profile, you might lose out on a job opportunity for your lack of being part of the socially acceptable crowd.

This sort of elevated tribal social credit takes another step in its vitriol in the form of cancel culture.

Top podcaster, entrepreneur, comedian, and UFC commentator Joe Rogan received this type of treatment in 2021 and 2022. After Rogan had signed a reported $200 million deal with Spotify, a group of Spotify employees petitioned the company to have Rogan’s show go through editorial supervision because they disagreed with some views expressed on the podcast.¹⁴ That didn’t work.

Months later, after Rogan had hosted a variety of scientists and medical experts who held views that were against mainstream groupthink, certain other academics, doctors, and influencers started to push what appeared to be a coordinated boycott of his podcast. They claimed he was spreading dangerous misinformation (none of which seemed consistent with the definition of dangerous and much of which has been validated over time).¹⁵ Then artist Neil Young said he would pull his work from the Spotify catalog (via his record label, which held the rights to his recordings), setting off further social outrage. ¹⁶ In a town hall meeting held amid the hullaballoo, Spotify’s CEO reportedly said they were not planning to edit or censor Rogan because the company operates as a distribution platform, not a publisher.¹⁷

When that didn’t work, someone dug up a series of out-of-context clips of Rogan using offensive language, including racially charged words, and put them together in a compilation video, circulating it throughout social media. Rogan called it a political hit job and rightfully shamed those going after him as judgmental, unforgiving, fu**s, which is the feature, not the bug, of this societal judgment-by-moral-superiority.¹⁸ As his business partners mostly stuck by him, that effort didn’t have the intended impact, ultimately gaining him two million podcast subscribers.¹⁹

Legendary comedian Dave Chappelle also faced a cancellation attempt when hundreds of Netflix employees staged a walkout in October 2021 to protest the comedian and his Netflix special The Closer. Bolstered by social media virtue signalers, the employees said Chappelle’s content—which, by the way, is made up of jokes—was harmful, and they pushed Netflix to pull the special.²⁰ One of the employees had been part of a small group that also crashed a Netflix board meeting in protest of Chappelle and his work.²¹

Likely prompted by the streaming service losing more than $50 billion in market cap after reporting their Q1 2022 earnings and seeing that entangling culture wars and business wasn’t good for their business, Netflix put out an employee memo. According to Variety, the memo included a new section called ‘Artistic Expression,’ explaining that the streamer will not ‘censor specific artists or voices’ even if employees consider the content ‘harmful,’ and bluntly states, ‘If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.’²²

While those movements tried to attack the livelihoods and social standings of these gentlemen and failed, likely because the targets were deemed too valuable to their respective business partners and they had strong support systems, others have succeeded. Ellen DeGeneres wound down her previously wildly successful daytime show in 2022 because of a string of moral outrages, including being photographed at an NFL game alongside former president George W. Bush, which created a backlash that included allegations of a toxic work culture (some of her staff was canceled in the wake of this, as well). Kyle Kashuv, a teen who gained awareness as a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, had Harvard rescind his acceptance after a series of texts between him and some friends from when he was sixteen years old surfaced and included offensive racial language. Whether it results from videotaping someone having a meltdown at their worst moment, digging up an offensive tweet from a decade ago, or even retweeting a controversial joke, many individuals, including a slew who were not public figures, have found themselves with their social credit declining.

The less connected you are with a group that will support and fight for you, the more effective these tactics are.

Sometimes this social witch hunt happens even when the information is perceived incorrectly. Nick Sandmann, who in 2019 was a student at Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, was falsely accused by various media and the social mob of aggression at a political demonstration in Washington, DC, an incorrect accusation made out of context. Eventually, more photos and videos disproved that narrative, and Sandmann settled lawsuits against CNN, the Washington Post, and NBCUniversal, the terms of which were undisclosed. However, had the other information not been available, who knows what long-lasting outcast treatment he would have endured?²³

Whether or not their accusations have merit, those who levy them do so with the intent to wield power and to deliver consequences of their choosing. Those consequences typically result in poor financial outcomes.

When a social moral code replaces a legal code and gains acceptance, it is only a matter of time before those in power want to leverage that dynamic to secure more power for themselves.

That begets the foundation for social compliance and social credit at the state/government level. This is the perfect tactic for the elite in a new financial world order to ensure that the people connected to them come out on top.

But how does a true state social credit system come to be? It requires two steps. The first is information-gathering on individuals. The second is those in power using the information without being challenged. When both of those become easy to do at scale, tyranny quickly follows.

At the onset of the new financial world order, both of those components are here. Technology enables easy, scalable information collection, storage, and analytical capabilities. People voluntarily shun privacy for convenience, ego, and other purposes, and so the information is available for such collection.

The social devolution where people are widely judged not in a court of law but rather a court of public approval sets up the second part—the creep of government and other powers being able to use information for compliance and to subjugate individual rights.

And so, today, we lie just a fraction of a millimeter away from a true state social credit system, the ultimate in tyrannical control. We are remarkably close to a place where by acting outside the preferred narrative, not agreeing with the mob, having a bad day, or engaging in wrongthink like not complying with government directives, criticizing the president, or being a gun owner, the government can penalize you. Potential penalties could remove your freedoms, big and small, including your ability to earn a living and provide for your family.

If you don’t comply, you can’t earn a living. You will own nothing.

To understand what that means and could look like in practice, I turn to the country that currently has the most advanced social credit system, China.

Social Credit: The Chinese Communist Party Model

It is easy to dismiss the notion that the US would act in a manner similar to China when it came to your rights. Ten years ago, I may have agreed the probability was low that something like that would happen anytime soon. After 2020, I can no longer agree.

We have already seen government and societal pushes for mandatory vaccines and masking, calls for (and actual) job loss for noncompliance, vaccine passports for eating in restaurants, and the government labeling a large part of the population as nonessential.

We have politicians who regularly attack individual citizens by name. How many times has Senator Elizabeth Warren called out specific people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos in an effort to push policy? The distance between what the government should be doing to ensure the protection of our rights and the government overtaking our rights has shrunk so substantially that a flea couldn’t make its way through the middle.

Yes-men and other useful idiots from the general population are more than happy to jump on board and support these state-disseminated endeavors and propaganda. It often reaffirms their point of view. Even better, in their estimation, it creates penalties for those who don’t conform, disagree with their point of view, and engage in wrongthink. The useful idiots who align with the state are happy to see penalties enacted without giving an iota of thought to principles, the precedent being set, and long-term consequences.

Given that we are so close to social credit, with the social acceptance of moral judgment outside the legal system and the technical means to collect and analyze information at scale, the Chinese system provides a frightening road map.

China’s Social Credit System, often referred to as the SCS or SoCS, is an emerging system of gathering information and engineering compliance for businesses, individuals, and other entities—with the exception, of course, of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).²⁴

According to Horizons, a global tech and human resources consultancy, "The term ‘social credit’ (社会信用体 in Chinese and shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì in pinyin) doesn’t have a precise meaning—rather, it is an intentionally broad and vague term allowing for maximal policy flexibility." Building in the power to change the meaning and aspects of the SCS at the CCP’s whim is itself a tool of control. You will see this in other systems of control that I will cover later in the book as well, like environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG).²⁵

Certain jurisdictions throughout China do have an associated SCS scoring system; some use a scale of letter grades or numerical values, but this has not been codified and standardized throughout the country as of yet.

SCS is primarily about gathering and analyzing behavioral data of individuals, then rewarding or punishing certain actions to force individuals into compliance with the types of behaviors the CCP wants and eliminating or suppressing behaviors they don’t.

The Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) describes the SCS efforts as being focused on the establishment of comprehensive digital files that track and document legal compliance.²⁶ I would add moral and social compliance as well.

SCS is wrapped in their perception of the concept of trust. Trust is not a new thing for societies. Whether in China or the US or just about every country around the globe, there is a certain moral code within society. Some elements of trust are formally codified into a legal system that balances individual rights (as in the case of theft, for example), and some of it is just what others find acceptable (perhaps distasteful and offensive, but not illegal, such as using foul language in public).

Social credit takes the concept of trust in society and puts it in the hands of central planners to dictate their morals and