The reason I asked, and to give you a little background into why, is because I used to read conspiracy lit as a hobby. The debt slave angle is a huge part of that underground.
Bankruptcy release has a long Jewish and Christian history and a democratic history that has been hijacked by modern society, in particular the Christian conservatives and the liberals for their own causes. Conservatives look down their noses at it, par the course with that morality code and whatnot. The ongoing Greek default situation is prime example. Liberals use it to pull on heartstrings, as they love to do.
In the end, bankruptcy is a democratic means for society to bear the burden of releasing people from debt enslavement. We all pay the price, whether in slightly higher interest rates or individual bailouts or IMF funding for countries.
Usurious interest rates are no longer the societal plague they used to be. We have an out; there's nothing wrong with using that tool if that's necessary for an individual's situation.
So now you know why I haven't responded much to your ongoing comments regarding debt enslavement. Yes, I have noticed them.
I'm not sure what you've read, but we probably aren't reading the same things. What you're referencing sounds interesting, though; I'd happily give it a read if you sent links and/or descriptions so I can find it.
With all this stuff, I suppose you have to keep my anthropological training in mind. I'm interested in dense, inconsistent patches of morality, and how that cacophony gets tamed by Priests, Law-makers, Teachers, etc. From this basic interest/perspective, it's terrifying and fascinating that terms like "debt", "guilt", "redemption", "sin" have become core religious concepts after having been born originally in discussions about ancient finance. It blows my mind how tightly the language of morality is wound up inside the language of the marketplace basically since Zoroastrianism... how tightly it these embraced one another in jewish politics, giving birth to messiahs, and Christian doctrines.
Modern economic theory has been based off the assumption that states and markets are separate things. This is a total myth. There's still some people that believe the market will regulate itself, for ****'s sake. And that the state just has to get out of the way in order to reach some harmonious hyper-flow of economic utopia, or some ****. This is just one generation after the great depression; just a few years after the rise of Keynes, and all the efforts by Reagans and Thatchers to forget about him, just a few years after Nixon unpegged the dollar from any kind of metallic commodity. Really, the house of the State is a temple dedicated to the marketplace. It shelters what it needs to shelter.
Somehow the whole American project has produced a society which has been incredibly unkind toward debtors. We'll bailout our lenders and keep chopping away at our patches of debt before we'd bailout fellow debtors. --My book club just recently finished a fiction which had debt as a core theme... and nobody even brought it up in our discussion. We can't even talk about debt amongst people with similar debt profiles. So much shame here.
I'm rambling...
I'm most troubled by the power that lenders have. There's a general assumption that the lender isn't actually taking a risk with the loan, and that it's absolutely within his/her right to pursue every legal avenue to get every dollar back. I say "his/her" but that was dumb, because we don't even know who lends us our money most of the time. Big banks cut those checks and then package that debt and send it out to a place that trades it around. It's weird.
I'd like the risk to be more equitably shared. And I think it's a shame that large swaths of debt (specifically, the kind of debt that everyday people are dealing with: student loans, mortgages, credit cards) haven't been eased SIGNIFICANTLY. 2008 revealed a lot. Especially revealing was how the USA decided to just put a bandaid on things and then try (quite successfully) to pretend nothing had happened.
I'd also like to be able to think OUTSIDE the morality of debt as much as possible. And I find it frustrating how hard this is. If I had any design for this thread, it was only to share those radio programs, and to hear a mostly unstructured rambling on the subject.
Anyway, thanks for getting real in here.
