A reminder of how Abraham Lincoln – the very first Republican president – asserted public ownership of the public’s money supply. With debt-free greenbacks, America defeated the racist slave power, created the first and finest public universities the world has ever known, built up industries that outpaced even the dominant British Empire, built the railroads, and settled the country with free homestead grants.  Why can’t we do this again? Oh, right, we want bankers to scan, approve and control every aspect of our lives: what house we live, what job we do, what education we get, how many kids we have.

Bank-debt money deliberately creates squalor and rewards greed. A debt-based money supply has no other object than to perpetuate the 19th-century class system of inequality, generation after generation. It ensures an ever-growing population of increasingly desperate people running as fast as they can up the ladder of credit, where ever-increasing interest rates will doom any enterprise they can dream up to escape debt. And the more productive they are, the more society’s economic noose tightens – even if they slip the noose and cheat the hangman, they will get to watch their unlucky classmates dancing in the air. Will their failure will make the winners feel good about themselves?

The game of musical chairs seems to Americans to be normal and right – God obviously wants many, many losers so that the winners appear magnified. But it is not God’s will that millions of college-educated Americans be mathematically guaranteed to be swindled out of the advantages of education by the debt they were forced to take on. And it is not normal that the brighter they are, the more disciplined and ambitious they are, more prestigious the school they attend, the more impoverished will be many of their lives. 

Student Debt Slavery: Bankrolling Financiers on the Backs of the Young