(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. He is a classical liberal constitutionalist in the Madisonian tradition, emphasizing institutional legitimacy and durability, self-government, individual liberty, and structural constraints on concentrated authority—wherever it resides.
Jack’s analysis focuses on the erosion of institutional governance and its consequences for legitimacy and effective self-government, including congressional abdication; judicial displacement of legislative authority; delegated monetary power; the entrenchment of the administrative state; executive aggrandizement; the normalization of emergency powers; degradations of federalism; and extraterritorial regulatory regimes that undermine domestic accountability. He applies this analytical framework to contemporary policy debates with an eye toward institutional repair, examining how structural failures manifest and interact across policy domains such as technology, finance, health care, and energy.
Jack writes and edits across formats, producing substantial long-form analysis as well as concise public- and policy-facing work, and regularly shepherds research projects from conception through publication. He engages with policymakers at the federal and state levels, media professionals, and other stakeholders to bring institutional analysis to bear on real-world governance challenges.
His work has been published by The Hill, Fox News, RealClearMarkets, and the Washington Examiner, among others. He is also the coauthor of The Next Big Crash, which analyzes the legal and institutional foundations of the modern financial system and their implications for property rights and investor asset security under conditions of financial stress and crisis governance.
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.
