The Real National Debt

Much is made of the national debt. It is perhaps the key issue that unites the far right, mainstream conservatives, and the socially liberal, fiscally conservative types like libertarians. And that makes sense, as conservatism - which has conserved precious little - has been reduced mostly to economic arguments, plus a degree of indignation against general insanity. Maybe we shouldn't encourage children to mutilate their genitals. Maybe we shouldn't take on insurmountable national debt. Conveniently, the national debt is one of the few appeals to rationale that conservatives can make without fear of being called a bigot, which is perhaps why they've largely retreated to that corner of social advocacy. In the near future, you probably will be called mean names for arguing against debt since it fuels social programs to buy votes from aid minorities, or because the debt benefits financial interests disproportionately dominated by Jews. Picture the future headline: Why Opposition to Crushing Debt is Anti-Semitic. Maybe Ben Shapiro will write it.

The upside of the national debt debate seems to be that it is one of the few useful rhetorical weapons that Republicans have in restraining Democrat-driven growth of the monolithic state. Every year or so a big battle rages about raising the debt limit. It is always raised, of course, but the left is forced to compromise on some demands. Thus, the national debt argument at least serves to put a damper on the Racket Ratchet. In practice, however, the Republicans are no more gentle than Democrats on debt growth; they just prefer to spend on war rather than welfare. It doubled under Bush, then again under Obama, and continues to grow quickly under Trump. Liberals no longer buy the Republicans' passionate calls for fiscal responsibility, thus those arguments are actually rhetorical weapons used against the Republican voters. Republican politicians are elected based on their promises to defend the interests of American families and America as a nation. They get to Washington and realize it's not so easy: if they defend the American nation, the corporate media will call them racist and xenophobic; if they defend the American family, they'll be called racist, homophobic, and sexist. So, they pay great lip service to fighting the national debt to appease their increasingly agitated electorate, but the debt just keeps growing.

What exactly is meant by the phrase national debt? What is the implied nation...the American nation? Such a concept has been declared racist by the left, and even much of the so-called right. What liberals and other opponents of America like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad argue is that America is not a nation but "belongs to all nations." Does that mean the nations of the world are going to pay off our debt? No, because the term national debt is a misnomer. It's not the debt of the nation; it's the debt of the federal government, which is hardly the American nation. No, the federal government is perhaps the foremost adversary against the American nation. We should pray night and day for the bankruptcy of the federal government as quickly as possible. [I don't mean that rhetorically, I mean literally pray. Jesus had an opinion on usury... his only noted act of violence was against the Jewish moneylenders. Do you think it is mere chance that the explosion of debt has coincided with plummeting church attendance? I don't.]

We should re-phrase the term national debt entirely. It should be referred to as the federal debt or as the imperial debt, depending on the audience. It should never be called the national debt because we don't own it, it was used against us, and we're told we don't exist anyway. There is, however, a real national debt, and it is much more dangerous to us than the ledger balance in Washington. We have a serious national debt in the sense of what programmers mean when they talk about technical debt. It is the defects that have been allowed to accumulate with, at best, the intention to correct later. In the sense of this blog's recent post Maintenance-Free Means Unmaintainable, it is the cost of the many decades worth of societal maintenance that traditional societies understood as vital but we have neglected. Just a few symptoms of our national debt are as follows.

• Sub-replacement birth rates, and all factors that contribute to it
• Decline of marriage and the rise of the "modern family"
• Rampant materialism and nihilism
• An opioid epidemic and general acceptance of substance abuse
• Stagnation of wages while global capitalists are flooded with new wealth
• Stifling student loan debt which drives young couples to delay family-building, often until it is too late
• The normalization and necessity of dual-income households, and the resulting "latchkey children" raised by daycares and government schools
• The surrender of our educational and media institutions to a demonic "secular" religion

We could spend pages writing these kinds of bullet points. Each is a bigger concern to us than whether or not Washington maintains its credit rating, or even if it resorts to runaway inflation. Inflation is the bogeyman everyone fears. But why? For one, inflation erases debt. Are you more worried about the lenders, or all the young people who have been lured into debt slavery? The individual can survive inflation, possibly even thrive, if prepared. Inflation would not only address some serious domestic wealth disparities, but would neuter the power that foreign holders of our currency hold over us, as this blog advocated a couple years ago in Global reserve currency: army of the modern empire.

The ugly reality is that the US will ultimately have to default. We should not look at those foreign reserves as debt we owe, but as a price those countries paid to have the liquidity to conduct international trade, which benefited their economies. And we should do so while we still have the military strength to not be told otherwise.

Similarly, I'd offer another piece of advocacy that would actually bring elements of the far-left and far-right together for some positive, combined political action. They should all, in unison, engage in a debt strike. No more student loan payments. That is much more constructive than this trend towards wonton violence by young, disgruntled, debt-riddled youth. Antifa goons bludgeon their opponents in the streets. The recent attack on a government facility by an armed left-wing lunatic was a guy who had been caught up in a nasty custody battle for years. (More costs of the national debt.) And at least a couple young right-wingers have shot up synagogues. [One of the stupidest reactions possible. The revolutionary Jews are almost always secular. Shooting up a synagogue because you despise Zionist control of media/finance institutions is about like shooting up a Catholic church to protest the proliferation of Marxist professors in the universities.]

I long noted the similarities between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. Both had the same fundamental disagreements. Both have been agitated by the media into fighting each other in the streets, rather than joining together to express common grievances. There is nothing they fear more than a unified debt strike. In addition to that, we should not reflexively oppose increases to the federal debt, so long as we prevent tax increases and social spending that harms the nation (like free healthcare to illegal immigrants, which all the Democrats support). We should also understand that we will eventually have to devalue the dollar to keep foreigners from sucking all the wealth back out of the country once it starts to lose favor. There are some hints out of the Trump administration that he is considering devaluing the dollar to compete with China's currency manipulation. I see no reason to oppose him on this. If you are on a fixed income, collect a salary from a place where cost-of-living increases are stingy, or have your life savings stuffed in a mattress or bank account, you may want to address your exposure to inflation. If you are in debt - most people are - and the US starts actively devaluing the dollar value, consider making the minimum payments and letting inflation do some of the work for you.