Odious Sovereignty
Debt can be "sovereign", "odious", or both. Odious sovereigns generate odious sovereign debt.
The other day, I read that the Biden administration is sending another $6.2 billion to Ukraine on the grounds that this money was already pledged, but inadvertently withheld due to an “accounting error”.1 I was reminded of the missing $2.3 trillion that US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reported on the day before the 9/11 catastrophe,2 and the $21 trillion gone missing from the Pentagon and HUD.34
What kind of government makes, and gets away with, financial mistakes and “accounting errors” of this magnitude? Are those who pretend to rule us completely brain-dead?
Close, but not quite. They just stupidly assume that the public is brain-dead. But intellectual incompetence is only part of the issue.
When Joe Biden promises billions of US dollars to Ukraine, and the EU promises billions of Third Worlders that they will enjoy riches and political clout if they migrate to Europe in order to parasitize and collapse its nations, they are not promising to earn the money with which to keep their promises. This is out of the question, as neither “work” nor “earning” is in their repertoire, at least under the strict definitions of these terms. Instead, they are promising to steal it. Specifically, they are promising to burgle and/or openly extort it from the public by explicit taxation and/or inflation (implicit taxation).