In The Morning News, I discussed how the debts accumulated from tax cuts and also the government’s management of inevitable market crashes are packaged and sold to investors. What one buys with a government bond is a claim on future tax revenues. This purchase provides the creditor with a debt that is not tied to a biological death. Conventional consumer debts go to and circle the nothingness of the debtor’s grave. There, or in the flames of an incinerator, more and more of the contract is pulled into and torn apart the death’s nothingness.
Death is then the negation of that which negated wages. But public debt transcends the existential limits of the individual, the ultimate unit of American ideology. But here, the fiction of the individual is abandoned and that which is actual, the social, is appropriated and twisted. The immortality of the social (or the public), which often protected the individual from “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” is transferred to paper held by the bondholder. The immemorial cycle of the young paying for the old initiated by the New Deal is broken and replaced by a public debt that never dies but rises from a fresh grave and flies straight to the maternity ward. If you are not born to a bondholder, you will not be born free.
If you want to be up on things related to public debt, read these books: Fictitious Capital by Cédric Durand, Buying Time by Wolfgang Streeck, and Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty.
