I don’t understand how anyone can believe debt is good. Certainly bankers believe other peoples’ debt to them is good. It is a means of control. But debt to anyone restricts freedom. No country can claim freedom if it’s in debt. Even the US government’s presumed debt to the Federal Reserve implies obligations. The US Constitution–as an economic document enslaving taxpayers to the federal government–reveals itself more clearly as this economic drama plays out. The US monetary system is based on debt, essentially to the Federal Reserve, which creates money out of thin air to lend to the US government at interest, based on appropriations by Congress. The Fed has no obligation to the federal government except to keep this fraud going. The federal government has no obligation to taxpayers, except the ones it tells taxpayers they need or want, like military “defense.” It presumes a right to collect taxes on every transaction and has a monopoly (which it has delegated to the Fed) on the currency it considers legitimate. Franklin D. Roosevelt made using gold as currency illegal.
The debt-backed dollar creates an upside-down system with perverted incentives to spend beyond one’s means and live in perpetual debt, just like the government. The debilitating outcome is wasteful spending that leads to over-expanding the money supply, “create jobs” and otherwise bloat the federal government’s reach, without adding anything of value.
There are warnings that this “debt bubble” will soon burst, even though “the economy” continues to “expand.” By “expansion” the fortune tellers on the payroll most probably are relying on interest rates, stock prices, reported corporate profits, low rates of unemployment, and “consumer” spending. Meanwhile, “predictors” of recession include the “inverted yield curve,” in which the yield on 10-year treasuries is lower than that on three-month ones. Who would tie up their money for ten years under that scenario? Maybe the purchasers don’t need their money or expect to need it anytime soon. Are they expecting deflation? Is a recession merely deflation? Isn’t deflation good for people who have more money than debt?
As long as I’m exploding myths, like the one that inflation is good and expected (if you’re a debtor, like the government), or that an “expanding economy” and “economic growth” are desirable. I contest the general assumption that government spending—especially deficit spending—is good for “the economy.” The excuse is that it creates jobs, but the underlying purpose is to widen and deepen the tax base. In order to get “consumers” to spend, you must put money in their pockets, or a semblance of money that can be used to pay taxes, and keep the money wheel spinning.
So people work make-work jobs to get fake money and “benefits” to buy cheap plastic junk made by slave labor in China to pay tariffs to the government that maintains its crop of economic slaves to cater to the Fed and Wall Street. The bankers lick their chops and conspire to create more mayhem and destruction so that they can invent more money to create even more artificial need for themselves.
The US government’s brain child, the Machiavellian first Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, must be well satisfied by now, because the masses really have been put in their place, except it’s not working. The latest way for the poor to take advantage of the rich is to become so disabled that they can’t even work, so require more for upkeep than the rich can afford (or want to afford), and they won’t go to war, as in the good ole days, or be considerate enough to die off by disease. Instead, they burden the “health care industry” with their chronic diseases obtained from living in this “wealthy,” industrialized nation that can afford to saturate the land, water, and air with fat, other oils, and their waste. We’re having trouble starting wars, although we’re trying. Big bad China has the nerve to sell more than it buys and is ganging up with our other enemies, like Russia, to provoke us into using our war toys and selling them to all our fair-weather friends.
Collapse of the debt bubble may be the best thing that could happen to the country and the world.
katharineotto 