One of my Facebook friends posted this —

Yes, Trump wants to open this protected wilderness to oil drilling.  Canada is burning, but we need more oil. Meanwhile the Trump Administration is paying billions to abandon wind farm projects, because he hates wind farms.

I thought of this when I read Paul Krugman’s latest Substack column, Trump’s War on the Future, Monetary Edition. Krugman discusses a digital payment system initiated by the government of Brazil called Pix that is very popular among Brazilians. It works like Apple Pay or Google Pay, but Pix payments are official currency and not transfers from private accounts. It’s free to use, and it sounds like Pix payments that you can make from your phone are the same as cash. I can see why that would be very handy. So when do we get something like that here?

Oops, not anytime soon, because Trump doesn’t like it. Krugman writes that “the Trump administration will try to punish Brazil for this success. It will do so by imposing tariffs on Brazilian exports under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which permits such tariffs to counter ‘unfair trade practices.'”

This doesn’t sound like any of our business, frankly. If this is working for Brazilians, I’m happy for them. Krugman says that what should worry us is if the European Union established a similar system for euros. Goodbye supremacy of the U.S. dollar.

But let’s be clear: the reason people might switch to digital euros will be because the US won’t be offering an equally good means of payment. Why won’t there be a digital dollar? Not because it’s a bad idea — as Brazil has shown, it would be a very good idea. But there are powerful special interests that oppose any such move.

Last year Republicans in the House passed a bill that didn’t just forbid the creation of a U.S. central bank digital currency; it prohibited any study of the issue by the Federal Reserve. “Don’t even think about parking here creating a digital dollar.”

Proponents of this ban claimed to have concerns about how a central bank digital currency would work. But it’s obvious that their real concern is that it would work too well. Crypto interests, in particular, are very worried that consumers who had access to digital dollars would lose interest in stablecoins and other cryptocurrency products, because these products, being risky and awkward to use, would not be competitive with a system that simply lets people make electronic payments in dollars.

And, gee, who was it who took in about $1.2 billion from crypto businesses last year? Some guy. It’ll come to me, I’m sure. Oh, yeah …

Finally, the furious opposition to central bank digital currencies reminds me of the Trump administration’s all-out efforts to block development of wind and solar power. In both cases we see political players beholden to special interests — crypto when it comes to money, fossil fuels when it comes to energy — who claim to favor technological progress, but scream “not like that” when a superior technology doesn’t take the economy where they want it to go.

This reminds me also of Trump’s canceling of policies that encouraged people to buy EVs, like the tax credits for EV purchases and leases. Yes, let’s let China get way ahead of us in EV development. If this were 1903 I can see trump trying to kill off automobiles to protect the horse and buggy industry (which made a big contribution to his presidential “library”).

As Krugman writes, “The Trump Administration has declared war on the future.” Well, he’s declared war on a future that is hospitable to humans, anyway. The future he’s taking us too may not be.