Why not a Jubilee

The American government exists in order to serve its citizens. Its purpose is to serve the American people.

It hasn’t done an outstanding job in any of those areas over the past few generations. There are many examples that could be given. They’re all tired and repetitive. One example that’s too often overlooked is that of the federal government creating a higher education system. This undermines American order and impoverishes middle class spiritually and materially. It also concentrates capital into the coffers anti-American institutions, while supporting the economic and social dominance of transnational elites.

Although state complicity is extensive and deep in the university cartel, it focuses on money. The federal government supports loans that are open to almost any American, regardless of their merits or earning potential to finance college tuition. This is a socially destructive assumption. Universities have been able to increase tuition fees and other costs at rates that are exponentially higher than the cost of education because they are guaranteed a blanket. The availability of loans backed by the government has attracted almost everyone to pursue a college education, reducing the value of the product both in terms of post-grad earning potential and actual education.

Anyone can tell you only one side of the story. But few people will share both sides. The people who admit that college is useless won’t concede that graduates have been given a bum deal, and the people who know that graduates have been given a bum deal (and thus support government action on student debt) can’t admit that the deal is bad because most college degrees are useless.

But the truth is that both of these are true. The bill of goods was sold to young Americans. None of the economic advantages promised to them when they took out those five-figure loans at the ripe age of 17 have survived the college craze. They were deceived.

The most pressing cause of student debt is its reduction. Stop the federal government’s support for universities in as full and as fast as you can. If federal intervention is necessary, tie it inextricably and clearly to merit. Give higher education the freedom of the market to bring the American economy closer to its proper, natural state.

This is just one part of the solution. It is possible to prevent more problems from happening, but millions of Americans still owe thousands of dollars in debt. They were urged by the government to buy a product that was not as good as they thought it would be. Middle-class college students are particularly affected by the debt they owe. They are prevented from buying homes or having children and are hindered in other ways that are necessary to maintain a healthy society. There must be something done.

Whoever suggests this is met with opposition that it amounts to wealth transfer from working class to middle class. You want the freely chosen debt of laptop workers to be paid for by poor, working stiffs like truckers and plumbers?

These objections are hilariously out of touch with class. These objections are hilariously out-of-touch. Truckers and plumbers have high incomes, relatively little debt and generally good salaries. The outrage is not without cause. Millions of Americans may have been saddled with other types of debts or bilked in an equally shameful manner by the same people that committed the college fraud. Why not redress the wrongs done to them? objectors ask, bitterly. Why don’t they forgive their mortgages. Help the single mom who has never gone to college, or the struggling working father trying to get by.

To this the only answer is: okay.

It is true that a mother of three should not be struggling to make her mortgage payment while McKinsey consultants’ Princeton loans disappear. There is no reason for a mother working with three kids to struggle to pay her mortgage. Student debt is bad, and must be addressed, because it discourages the middle class–once the backbone of American civilization–from family formation and home ownership. all of the debts on which society was rebuilt are bad and should be addressed. It violates both American and biblical principles.

We won the Cold War, but our citizens were deprived of their rights and priviledges. American workers’ purchasing power, and the American family’s, are at their lowest level in many decades. Not only are fertility rates at an all-time low, but also because of the death-cult that has ruled our culture, even normal people have to save and save for a child whose future prospects will be far less than theirs. The majority of Americans who were born within the past few years won’t own homes or land. Most will need to take out long-term mortgages with exorbitant interest rates. Our nation has become a country that is in debt, with its citizens being subject to all the evil predations by usurers. Let the American government serve America’s people.

This crisis will not be resolved entirely (not even mostly) by unburdening debt-laden, low-wage, white-collar workers who were duped into thinking that their only chance for success was to buy into the government-university cartel; but neither can they be written out of the solution. It is necessary to revise the relationship of society to money, debt and ownership from top to bottom, coast to coast.

It is worth recalling, in the grand scheme of human events, how abnormal our status quo really is. For most of human history, we have known that usury can be both dangerous and immoral. This is what kills civilizations.

Since time immemorial protections have been put in place to stop it. Scripture clearly condemns it. The Bible does not just condemn usury. It mandates a jubilee year, once after every 49–seven Sabbath cycles of seven years, roughly every generation–in which, among other things, debts are forgiven. God is more wise than men, and Moses’ rules are just and well-written. This is not a Judaic country but a Christian one. The New Covenant binds us not only from the eternally and divinely-ordered principles but also from the law of old.

There is a group of people who are interested in these issues. They understand the economics and the sources of money, as well as how the spending of this money will impact the other. They will figure the details. I don’t believe in numbers and especially not big numbers.

These people will need to find the money. They might tax university endowments to reduce student debt. These huge capital stores were created back in the days when universities served the public good. (We could start at a nice, round figure–maybe something like 100 percent.) There are other options to hold institutions accountable for not delivering. In the meantime, the larger crisis of homeownership could be addressed by repatriating hundreds of thousands U.S.-owned acres by Chinese communists, which is our greatest national security threat, and extending the principle to all predatory foreign and domestic actors.

I am just throwing around ideas; the experts could figure out a solution. This is not a policy roadmap, but an urgent and fundamental sentiment. The dispossession of American citizens is a crime which demands justice. It is possible to imagine a full jubilee of a nation that has been enslaved by debt. But surely movements can be made back toward an economy of ownership and work and away from one not just open to but founded on usury.

Maybe a better analogy, for those beholden to the novel and un-American principle of secularism, is not the jubilee but Solon’s seisachtheia. Solon was elected to power during the first years of the sixth century B.C. in Athens, which was plagued with debt and had an unfair legal system. Huge sections the Athenian populace were forced to work in slavery or servitude.

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Solon was a great lawyer who recognized the urgent nature of the crisis as well as the real danger of civil war. The seisachtheia laws freed the debt slaves of Athens, returned the property stripped from debtors, and placed a legal cap on the area of estates to prevent the repeated concentration of economic power in the hands of a few.

It received as much as student-debt forgiveness (although it was done with more foresight, and an actual eye towards justice). But, over generations, it reshaped the entire order of Athenian politics and economics–delivering in Athens, after more than a century, the first real golden age of Western civilization.

We can only hope America will approach a Solon moment. This is a moment when, right at the edge, radical redirection brings back citizens to their dignity. This would be difficult. It wouldn’t be very popular. This reform may never bear fruit in our lifetime. After completing his great reforms, Solon went to Egypt for 10 years. It may have been worth it, even if it was nothing else.