Debt and getting your mind blown.

Here's a question that I never asked myself until I started to read the book "Debt". Or maybe, if asked, I would have answered like you or most people out there without actually thinking it through. That question is:

Do all DEBT must be paid back?

Now if you're thinking DOOH! then think again. Of course, it depends on what debts means or at what level. But the idea is that if the bank loans you money do you have to give them back? Is it fair for them to keep asking and asking despite the fact that they already made the amount and extra from you already?

Here's what David Graeber argues in his book, or at least the first part that I got to read...that in fact, not all debts must be paid because debt implies a risk. I loan money, expecting a profit...but there's a risk: you might lose the money, or spend them unwisely or even steal them. The risk must exist in order for the loan to be a loan..or else.

Or else what really? Well, imagine infinite power and grit into getting the money back + interest. Imagine a super bank that will last forever and will hunt you forever until you pay back, that nothing and never will stop this monster to haunt you, your family, your future family until the end of time, the end of your line or you pay it back. That sounds very scary but let's just imagine this:

You take a loan for 100.000$ + interest of 10%/year. You open a business pay back what you can for 4 years then you bankrupt, you sell everything pay back the bank what you can and call it a day. Problem is that you paid back about 50.000$ but you still owe them about 70.000$. In a somewhat healthy society you can fill for bankruptcy and get some leniency etc. But let's say we're in a world where this bank is allpowerful. Now what?

Well, now you need to become their slave for 20 years at 5$/hour.
Or now, you have to sell your daughter as a prostitute for 4 years to their CEO.
Or, if the sum is large enough, you and your family are their slave for 3 generations.

Now imagine, a bank with this power..why wouldn't they take ANY loan offered to them? No risk, all rewards.

One must his debts....a self-evident truth that is not actually so evident and not even true. Blew my mind, maybe it will make you think too :)

So coming back to the Lannisters, if they ALWAYS pay their debts, you must ALWAYS loan to them, right? They're house motto is really bad business and recipe to disaster...I won't be surprised if they're wiped out by the end of the books. And now we know why!

|PS: get the book, it's awesome.