The transfer of state power
to private individuals
The secret, as you well know, is in the interest rates.
The interest rate is the crystallized,
actual, the tangible form of the
basic idea of our system:
This is how money gives birth to money.
The capitalist, based on the fact that he has
money that he doesn't need
and therefore can lend it, has the justification to
accumulate over time
more and more money without having to work for it.
Others will work for him.
The interest rate is
what enables
someone to get richer and
richer.
Without interest, our
system
would not be feasible.
Without interest we
would not
have all the curves seen so
far.
Without interest no
explosion is possible.
And of course the interest rate is the reason that
makes the debt grow
continuously, with the result that after some years it
cannot be repaid.
Since in the case of state indebtedness it's a
matter of
long-term debt, the interest rises to enormous heights.
After several years, the debt due to interest
becomes many times the original amount.
For example, if in 1981 Greece had closed a loan
for thirty years
with an interest rate of 17% (which at that time was
very realistic),
it would in 2011 owe one hundred times the original
amount.
The debt can no longer be paid off and the state
is
increasingly obliged to follow the decisions of its
creditors.
If you're in debt, and every year your
debt grows, you don't have the luxury
of making the decisions yourself.
Your creditor will make the decisions and you have
only to obey meekly.
Otherwise you know what will happen to you. At the
slightest disobedience,
he will cut off the loan, and you will collapse.
Isn't it funny?
The state,
that is where wealth is created
(because of course wealth is not generated
in the vaults of the capitalists)
is enslaved to its creditors.
The state, which
represents
all the potential of
production
• with the work force,
• the factories,
• the cultivated fields,
• the research institutes,
• with the ships, trains and planes,
• with the schools, the hospitals
• and the legislative parliament,
• even with the police and the army
is absolutely powerless
before its
creditors, and works
exclusively
for a single purpose, to
make the
private financiers richer
every day.
The true power doesn't belong to the state.
It belongs to the creditor. He makes the
decisions,
and the state is obliged to execute his commands.
The second question, namely where this story with
the public debt leads to, is also easy to answer:
The debt will continue to rise.
Like all other important dimensions of our world
which are constantly growing explosively:
• population,
• environmental pollution,
• amassed wealth,
• so the national debt will continue to grow.
Just as we have all the other explosions,
we have the explosion of national debt.
The explosion is universal because it is
woven into the nature of our system.
If someone is so naive as to believe that the
states would one day pay off
their debts and become independent from their creditors,
he need only take
a look at the budget of any state to learn the truth.
What is foreseen and what is making the ministers
anxious, is not how
to pay off their debt (that was forgotten long ago),
but where to find the
further, even larger loans, required in the following
year.
And the funniest part is, they all pretend to be ignorant and astonished:
― The
disaster hit us all of a sudden.
While everything was
going fine, the crisis suddenly came.
Totally unexpected.
We do not know who
caused it.
But we have to pay the
debts.
So we are forced to
take some extraordinary measures.
We must cut salaries
and pensions.
Extraordinary, as the
crisis was extraordinary.
Bravo, extraordinary!
• When you got the loan, which you squandered (and some of
your people put a part in their own pockets) didn't you
know,
that we would repay it a hundredfold thirty years
later?
• Did you not read the papers that you signed at that time?
• Didn't they teach you the calculation of compound interest
in elementary school?
• Wasn't it absolutely certain that the banks would get our money?
(Not their money, our money, because at that time they
gave us
one thousand and now they take one hundred thousand).
• What is this extraordinary event that gives you the right to take
extraordinary measures?
• Wasn't the crisis of capitalism entirely predictable, with the
elementary considerations we made in Chapter "A
serious joke"?
But where does that lead?
Will the states be in debt more and more to a few
individuals,
who will become in this way ever stronger and stronger,
acquiring
continuously more power over the states?
Will the sovereign rights of the state more and
more
be transferred to its private lenders?