“So-called ‘public debt’ is, of course, never contracted by ‘the public’ (if that means all the people of a particular country) it is contracted by a tiny, parasitic minority that lives at the expense of the rest of the public, and which has arbitrarily declared itself the rightful rulers and the designated collective-bargaining agents of everybody else in the country — whether or not anybody else ever agreed to that arrangement. When banks or foreign governments loan money to a government, they loan it to that tiny, parasitic minority, and they do so with the expectation that their ‘investment’ will be repaid by means of taxation, which is to say, by means of the money that the government extracts from ‘the public’ by force.” (01/14/09)