The Chains of Debt

The lure of easy money now and a payment date that seems far away into the future is quietly but efficiently gaining ground in the war for the souls of men. That great dungeon master, debt, is binding more and more people to a life of slavery every day. The debt of individuals, companies, and governments alike is reaching staggering levels.

In October of 2004, USA Today reported that $84,454 is the average household's personal debt and $473,456 is the average household's share of government debt, including Medicare and Social Security. In Fiscal Year 2005 alone the US federal government accrued $352.3 billion in interest on outstanding debt! That's over $1000 of interest for every man, woman, and child in this entire country.

Debt can be a crushing force, robbing us of our freedoms to do that which we please, and chaining us to our obligations. The following is a story from a Yahoo Finance article:

"It took William R. Love a full decade to get through college, mostly because he kept quitting to make what money he could at places like Burger King and Friendly's Ice Cream. Then, when he finally graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2002, he couldn't find a decent job. His wife, Jessica, pressured him to take whatever he could find, and eventually he did. But he begrudged her; she was disappointed in him. A year later their marriage collapsed.

Now, at age 31, he is about to finish his master's degree in business at RIT. William is charming and highly capable and has lots of ideas about what he might do. He thought of moving to Chicago, a city he regards as full of promise. But he's realizing that to secure the $70,000-a-year job he hopes for, he has to be willing to go pretty much anywhere. He would, though, like to stay within driving distance of his parents, who live in rural Pennsylvania; money for plane tickets home may be hard to come by. William knows he will have to live frugally for years so that he can pay off the $71,000 he owes in student loans and the $40,000 balance on his credit cards.

William lives with his girlfriend, Savita Thakur, who is a 28-year-old technical writer and part-time student in the same MBA program. But he won't be in a position to get married, have children, or buy a house for a long, long while. 'I have to meet my financial goals to pursue my career properly. I can't take on more debt and do that,' he says. In this, he is not alone: Fourteen percent of graduates said in 2002 that they had delayed marriage because of their loan obligations, compared with 9% in 1987. (Young and Broke: Your Money - Yahoo! Finance)"

Like William, many have crushing levels of debt, which forces them to make choices they wouldn't normally make if they could avoid them. In this case, he and his girlfriend are putting off marriage, children, and a house because of the debt. Are these people really free to do what they wish? Not really. They are essentially locked away in a prison of their own making, performing slave labor for those who get rich off their interest payments. The lenders are the masters, the debtors are the slaves. Debt is a form of bondage. We think we own things, but in reality, our things own us.

I dread the grave consequences that, I fear, must come to pass when the already crushing weight of all this personal, corporate, and governmental debt comes crashing down on all of us. The great economic and personal tragedy that will result will have horrible effects upon society as we know it. The great stock market crash of 1929 was precipitated by high levels of debt in stocks. I fear that the high levels of debt in life will bring an economic crash the likes of which we have never seen before. My advice: Get out of as much debt as possible, as soon as possible, and start putting away a year's worth of food and emergency supplies (as we already should be doing).