When debt becomes a government-administered shell game relying on fraud, theft, and compulsion, the ethics of debt break down throughout the society. Neither the coercive welfare state nor the imperial warfare state would be possible without fiat debt. If the government had to extract its funding from a real money economy, with a finite and limited supply of currency, every dollar taken from that economy for income redistribution or bombs would be a dollar that could not be spent for private investment, production, or consumption. The real cost of government spending, and the real burden it placed on the economy, would be direct and clear. Long before governments reached the roughly 40 percent of the GDP they currently spend (combined federal, state, and local governments) their parasitic load on the economy would kill the host. The unethical means of funding the welfare and warfare states indict their ends; intellectual and moral bankruptcy precede fiscal bankruptcy.

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