(To view the full Policy Brief, click here)
Key Takeaways:
- The proposed 2022 amendments to Articles 9 and 12 of the Uniform Commercial Code strip individuals of their property rights to real-world assets.
- The entities responsible for the UCC’s governance consist of partisan actors who serve special interests.
- The UCC has already been used to abrogate property rights to investment securities through amendments to Article 8.
- The 2022 amendments facilitate the adoption of a U.S. central bank digital currency, one of the biggest threats to economic freedom and individual autonomy facing us today.
- The same language used to facilitate a U.S. CBDC also paves the way for the abrogation of property rights to tangible assets through dematerialization and tokenization.
- The proposed amendments to UCC Articles 9 and 12 cede individuals’ property rights to the world’s largest financial institutions.
- States’ widespread adoption of the 2022 UCC amendments would pave the road to a completely digitized economy in which all tokenized real-world assets would be legally controlled by financial behemoths.
- The economic activity and freedom of all individuals would be dependent on the whims of the central banks and financial institutions that control the blockchain networks on which tokenized assets are transacted.
- Policymakers and the general public must be wary of the 2022 UCC amendments and those who are advocating for the dematerialization and tokenization of assets.
- It would behoove state legislators to prevent too-big-to-fail financial institutions from taking control of all of society’s assets through UCC Articles 9 and 12, while also re-establishing property rights to investment securities through UCC Article 8.
Daylea DuVall Camp is a fellow with the American Journey Experience: Freedom Rising Fellowship Program and a policy advisor for The Heartland Institute.
Jack McPherrin is The Heartland Institute’s research editor, as well as a research fellow within Heartland’s Emerging Issues Center.
Jack is a Senior Fellow at Our Republic. His work focuses on constitutional order, institutional governance, and the conditions necessary for effective and legitimate self-government.
His analysis examines how shifts in institutional authority affect public trust and policymaking, including congressional abdication; judicial displacement of legislative authority; delegated monetary power; the expansion of the administrative state; executive aggrandizement; the normalization of emergency powers; degradations of federalism; and extraterritorial regulatory regimes that undermine domestic accountability. His work is informed by a constitutional tradition concerned with institutional limits, accountability, and the preservation of liberty, emphasizing structural constraints on concentrated authority—wherever it resides.
He applies this analytical framework across policy domains such as technology, finance, health care, and energy, with a focus on how structural failures manifest in real-world governance challenges and how they might be addressed.
Jack writes and edits across formats, producing both long-form analysis and concise public-facing work, and regularly leads research projects from development through publication. He engages with policymakers at the federal and state levels, media professionals, and other stakeholders.
His writing has appeared in The Hill, Fox News, RealClearMarkets, and the Washington Examiner, among other outlets. He is also the coauthor of The Next Big Crash, which examines the legal and institutional foundations of the modern financial system and their implications for property rights and investor security under conditions of financial stress.
Jack also serves as a Senior Policy Analyst and Research Fellow at The Heartland Institute. He holds a master’s degree in international affairs from Loyola University Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in economics and history from Boston College.
