- Reaction score
- 3,375
- Location
- In a kakistocracy
When a bank grants a loan it lends nothing. It types a number into a screen. The principal is conjured from air. The interest is not. The interest must be dug out of the real world, out of muscle, out of hours, out of some man’s back at five in the morning while the banker’s espresso machine warms up.
Every note in circulation was born this way, as a loan with interest stapled to it. Which means the world owes more than all the money that exists. It can never be paid. It was never meant to be paid. A debt that cannot be settled is not a debt. It is a permanent claim on human working hours, and the polite word for that arrangement was abolished in the nineteenth century, on paper anyway. Slavery.
Count what they actually take
Do the arithmetic on one working man and watch the carcass get stripped.
Income tax takes a third off the top before he sees a cent. Then VAT on everything he touches. Fuel levies. Rates on the house he already paid for twice, because a twenty year bond buys one house for him and one for the bank. Licence fees. Tolls. Levies on the levies. Every price on every shelf carries a hidden third of embedded interest, the shopkeeper’s bond, the trucker’s financing, the farmer’s overdraft, all folded into the bread. Then inflation, the quiet one, the pickpocket that works nights, thinning his savings while he sleeps so the state can water down what it owes its bondholders.
Stack it all. Tax, tax on the taxed, interest on everything, dilution on the remainder. The working man keeps maybe twenty cents of the value his hands produce. Eighty goes up the pipe.
A serf gave the lord a third and everyone called it bondage. The modern man gives eighty and calls it citizenship. The serf could at least see the castle.
Where the pipe empties
Follow the eighty cents. It does not vanish. It arrives.
It arrives as a yacht in Monaco with a helicopter pad, owned by a man whose trade is moving typed numbers between screens. It arrives as a Lamborghini bought with bonus money from a bank that was bailed out with the taxes of the very man now watching it drive past his bus stop. It arrives as a war. Wars are the biggest line item of all, funded by bonds your grandchildren are already signed to, fought by the sons of the taxed, never by the sons of the bondholders. No banker’s boy has ever come home in a box. Check the record. The ledger of the dead is a working class document from the first page to the last.
The men at the pipe’s end produce nothing. Not a loaf, not a bolt, not a line of working code. They produce claims. They type obligations into existence and then hold the whole species to them, and for this they are paid better than the surgeons who stitch us and the engineers who keep the lights on.
Why nobody swings for it
Because the design has no throat. There is no single villain, no counting house to burn. There is a fund that owns a bank that holds your bond, and your pension owns a sliver of the fund, so every man is wired into his own harness as a minority shareholder. Revolt against it and you revolt against your own retirement. The chain was welded into a circle on purpose. A circle has no anchor point to strike.
The old arrangement branded the claim onto skin. Crude, but legible. The man knew what he was and who owned him. The new arrangement prints the claim into the money itself, into every price, every payslip, every invoice, and then teaches the man to feel gratitude for his wage, guilt for his overdraft, and pride on the day they finally let him retire, worn out, at seventy, with a pension already half eaten by the pickpocket.
They took the whip away and replaced it with a coefficient. It works better. A whipped man knows he is whipped. A taxed man argues that the weather is to blame.
A debt is a thing a man can finish paying. Nobody will finish paying this. Their children are collateral already, priced in before their first breath. That is not finance. That is livestock accounting, and the working world is the herd.
Every note in circulation was born this way, as a loan with interest stapled to it. Which means the world owes more than all the money that exists. It can never be paid. It was never meant to be paid. A debt that cannot be settled is not a debt. It is a permanent claim on human working hours, and the polite word for that arrangement was abolished in the nineteenth century, on paper anyway. Slavery.
Count what they actually take
Do the arithmetic on one working man and watch the carcass get stripped.
Income tax takes a third off the top before he sees a cent. Then VAT on everything he touches. Fuel levies. Rates on the house he already paid for twice, because a twenty year bond buys one house for him and one for the bank. Licence fees. Tolls. Levies on the levies. Every price on every shelf carries a hidden third of embedded interest, the shopkeeper’s bond, the trucker’s financing, the farmer’s overdraft, all folded into the bread. Then inflation, the quiet one, the pickpocket that works nights, thinning his savings while he sleeps so the state can water down what it owes its bondholders.
Stack it all. Tax, tax on the taxed, interest on everything, dilution on the remainder. The working man keeps maybe twenty cents of the value his hands produce. Eighty goes up the pipe.
A serf gave the lord a third and everyone called it bondage. The modern man gives eighty and calls it citizenship. The serf could at least see the castle.
Where the pipe empties
Follow the eighty cents. It does not vanish. It arrives.
It arrives as a yacht in Monaco with a helicopter pad, owned by a man whose trade is moving typed numbers between screens. It arrives as a Lamborghini bought with bonus money from a bank that was bailed out with the taxes of the very man now watching it drive past his bus stop. It arrives as a war. Wars are the biggest line item of all, funded by bonds your grandchildren are already signed to, fought by the sons of the taxed, never by the sons of the bondholders. No banker’s boy has ever come home in a box. Check the record. The ledger of the dead is a working class document from the first page to the last.
The men at the pipe’s end produce nothing. Not a loaf, not a bolt, not a line of working code. They produce claims. They type obligations into existence and then hold the whole species to them, and for this they are paid better than the surgeons who stitch us and the engineers who keep the lights on.
Why nobody swings for it
Because the design has no throat. There is no single villain, no counting house to burn. There is a fund that owns a bank that holds your bond, and your pension owns a sliver of the fund, so every man is wired into his own harness as a minority shareholder. Revolt against it and you revolt against your own retirement. The chain was welded into a circle on purpose. A circle has no anchor point to strike.
The old arrangement branded the claim onto skin. Crude, but legible. The man knew what he was and who owned him. The new arrangement prints the claim into the money itself, into every price, every payslip, every invoice, and then teaches the man to feel gratitude for his wage, guilt for his overdraft, and pride on the day they finally let him retire, worn out, at seventy, with a pension already half eaten by the pickpocket.
They took the whip away and replaced it with a coefficient. It works better. A whipped man knows he is whipped. A taxed man argues that the weather is to blame.
A debt is a thing a man can finish paying. Nobody will finish paying this. Their children are collateral already, priced in before their first breath. That is not finance. That is livestock accounting, and the working world is the herd.
