Vox Day and Michael Hudson have it right about the doom of debts in society.

Jesus wasn’t just talking about sin when he told us to pray for the forgiveness of our debts. That’s one of the reasons the Pharisees hated him so much. Michael Hudson is interviewed concerning a very important trilogy of economic history he is writing:

MH: The key public concern throughout history has been to prevent debt from crippling society. That aim is what Babylonian and other third-millennium and second-millennium Near Eastern rulers recognized clearly enough, with their mathematical models. To make an ideal society you need the government to control the basic utilities — land, finance, mineral wealth, natural resources and infrastructure monopolies (including the Internet today), pharmaceuticals and health care so their basic services can be supplied at the lowest price.

All this was spelled out in the 19th century by business school analysts in the United States. Simon Patten [1852-1922] who said that public investment is the “fourth factor of production.” But its aim isn’t to make a profit for itself. Rather, it’s to lower the cost of living and of doing business, by providing basic needs either on a subsidized basis or for free. The aim was to create a low-cost society without a rentier class siphoning off unearned income and making this economic rent a hereditary burden on the economy at large. You want to prevent unearned income.

To do that, you need a concept to define economic rent as unearned and hence unnecessary income. A well-managed economy would do what Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Marx and Veblen recommended: It would prevent a hereditary rentier class living off unearned income and increasing society’s economic overhead. It’s okay to make a profit, but not to make extractive monopoly rent, land rent or financial usury rent.

JS: Will human beings ever create such a society?

MH: If they don’t, we’re going to have a new Dark Age.

If an executive order and some attendant regulations can ban bump stocks, then some similar measures could easily make debt (all of it) illegal. Usurers would turn in their notes to the police to be destroyed. Future usury would become a felony. There’s also bankruptcy; if Congress could be bothered to govern, they could involuntarily draft everyone (including the US government, the states, and the cities) into court for mandatory clean-slating.

Or we could just have the dark age.