© Ivan Radic/CC BY 2.0Cancelled
When debts at interest grew too high to be repaid, the slate was wiped clean. Debts were forgiven, the debtors' prisons were opened, and the serfs returned to work their plots of land. This could be done because the king was the representative of the gods who were said to own the land, and thus was the creditor to whom the debts were owed. The same policy was advocated in the
Book of Leviticus, though
it is unclear to what extent this biblical Jubilee was implemented.
That sort of across-the-board debt forgiveness can't be done today because most of the creditors are private lenders. Banks, landlords and pension fund investors would go bankrupt if their contractual rights to repayment were simply wiped out. But we do have a serious debt problem, and it is largely structural. Governments have delegated
the power to create money to private banks, which create most of the circulating money supply
as debt at interest. They create the principal but not the interest, so more money must be repaid than was created in the original loan. Debt thus grows faster than the money supply, as seen in the
chart from WorkableEconomics.com below. Debt grows until it cannot be repaid, when the board is cleared by some form of market crash such as the 2008 financial crisis, typically widening the wealth gap on the way down.
Comment: The ironic thing is that he's probably right, but in exactly the opposite way he's suggesting. The official information put out by government bodies is exactly the misinformation that's costing lives. The FDA, the CDC, the ADA, the USDA - these are the top purveyors of misinformation that is threatening lives.
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