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I've been reading Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals lately and in order to understand it better I thought this might be the right place to start the discussion. This is my understanding of the first two parts of the book (part three will follow soonish). Here we go! Part I In the beginning, the ruling elite (i.e. slave masters) define good and bad. Originally they only refer to qualitative differences. Good is nothing more than someone / something better, higher, stronger than the average. In a similar way bad only means something low, weak and ugly – the plebs and the products of their work. No morality has been invented yet, might makes right – the nobility takes what they think naturally belongs to them in a similar way as wolves hunt elks. It is hardly a coincidence that most heraldic signs of the nobility have lions, eagles and bears in them. Morality gets invented by the slave class as a survival mechanism for themselves: whatever the slaves must do in order to survive becomes a virtue. Since the slaves cannot openly be rebellious and keep the product of their own labour they define weakness, lack of courage and even obedience as virtues. In the slave morality 'good' means someone not like the slave masters, it defines good purely by negation of the 'noble' good. To describe slave masters in these new terms it uses the word 'bad'. At the bottom of this morality is the feeling of resentment hiding in plain sight – instead of avenging masters in the real world, what the slave morality offers as medicine is the idea of the spiritual world after death, where a rightful judge will punish the slave masters for their sins and reward the slaves for their virtues. To propagate these ideas, you'll need a new class, the priests. Part II – conscience and bad conscience If I understood correctly Nietzsche thinks that the origin of conscience follows roughly this causal chain: Active forgetting → Active remembering → Being able to give and keep promises → Seeing every human transaction through the lenses of validity of promises to others and/or to yourself == conscience. Remembering with regard to promises is a manifestation of your own strong will to power (yearning for freedom) – you can only give promises if you believe you're strong enough to be able to keep them even in the face of accidents etc. Older societies needed to 'remind' people of the necessity of remembering with different forms of torture. In order to understand bad conscience we need to grasp the origin of guilt. The most primitive form of agreement (promise) is the contract between the debtor and the creditor. Nietzsche claims that in the ancient world people enjoyed causing each other pain – usually this privilege was reserved for the masters, but even the plebs had sometimes this luxury. If your debtor was unable to pay you, you could demand your payment in pound of flesh – either as some organ of your debtor or as your debtors freedom all together (i.e. your debtor would become your slave). In a similar way, tribes we're thought to be indebted to their ancestors (gods). Amount of debt would be directly proportional to success of the tribe. Therefore, to please the gods they would sacrifice cattle and even humans to their ancestors. Original sin ('Schuld' means both guilt and debt!!) is precisely this feeling of indebtedness to your forefathers. This is also the bad conscience people feel and religions – such as environmentalism and multiculturalism - utilize in order to keep the slaves in check; “polluting the Earth by existing” and “white guilt”. Christianity claims to solve this problem by sacrificing the God himself on a cross for the unpayable debts of mankind. Bad conscience is formed once the human animal recognizes he cannot escape the society – his natural aggression and cruelty now turn inwards. Original sin would be one form in which this phenomenon manifests itself. So what do you think? Did I miss something crucial here? Should I read 'Beyond Good and Evil' before I even start to tackle this book? One of the most important parts was the link between guilt and credit. Could this ancient moral link be the real cause why nobody has succeeded reinventing the money and making it popular - instead of it (credit money system that is) having been the monopoly of the governments for so long? Anyway, I'm happy to hear your thoughts.

Hi all, I've read the book and it's companion (Cashflow) and that's how I got introduced to the concepts of 'borrowing your way out', 'delayed gratification', 'gaming the system', 'passive income'... many more. Those two books were and are a fascinating read with a lingering sense of a 'humble mentor' backing you intellectually while you get familiar with concepts rarely discussed in that particular form. Read them if you can. I however think his methodology (maybe that's why I'm not a millionaire with a huge debt also) is for the blunt, courageous, risk-taker who also tries to minimise the fallout to a degree. My aim here is to discuss caveats, useful reminders further aiding inoculation against zealous belief, cult-like attitude regarding his catchy but risky ideas put forward. Barnsley

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/04/02/trump-new-trade-deals-will-eliminate-19-trillion-us-debt-8-years/ The title speaks for itself. Obviously the trade deficit alone can't pay off the debt. What does he really mean, and what would be the ramifications of this? This is another article, bashing his claim. Calling it impossible and magical. Is he really that wrong? Or is the WP missing some crucial facts? Could growth alone account for this increase in tax revenue? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/02/trumps-nonsensical-claim-he-can-eliminate-19-trillion-in-debt-in-eight-years/

I'm new so if this topic has already been done to death then apologies and please direct me to the relevant thread or podcast. When expressing concern about (particularly government) debt, the conversation tends to go as follows: ME: Man, are we in trouble... RESPONSE: Aw come on. Every country has huge debts. Don't worry there's loads of money, it's government austerity that's the problem. ME: That isn't much of an argument...crippling interest payments...stealing from the unborn etc. ...eventually... RESPONSE: Look everybody owes everybody else so it all cancels out anyway. There'll be some sort of reset and it'll all get sorted out. It's just not an issue, relax. So my question is how best to counter this in a way that people can easily grasp? I figure that if all debt is suddenly magically written off then the entire Finance industry loses its reason to exist and everything in your bank account, pension plan, stock portfolio, insurance policies etc becomes worthless. However this doesn't seem to persuade. Any thoughts as to how to convince people that there is actually a problem?

This thread is for information regarding a presentation on "The Fall of Germany - Coming Catastrophes in the German Economy". Please feel free to post interesting facts/statistics (preferably in bullet form) with links to the source material below. Michael asked me if I would like to put the presentation together, and I am happy to do so. Michael: “Basically, it's just a massive overview of the entire economic and social landscape of the various countries, the positives, the negatives and a future forecast based on current trends. Germany is our 5th biggest market, and we've already done videos on the top four markets.”

I refuse to pay my student loan debts. The banks are criminals The governments are criminals. The contracts are not valid. As an act of civil disobediance I refuse to pay and I'm proud to defend that decision. Please let me know what you think.

Hey just wanted to know what this community thought about this one hour and half documentary about the Federal Reserve, It's origins and how to operates as I have learned a great deal about economics from this video.

So couple of days back I was debating with a Socialist friend of mine who came out saying that states can borrow money as much as they want. I obviously asked him that how the hell could that be possible? Well this is how he explained it: 1. States don't have to pay back their debt because they theoretically last forever. 2. If states were to privatize or end public sector it would cause unemployment, which therefore would require these new unemployed people to be supported. So the state would need to borrow even more money to do so. 3. If state is getting in trouble with paying back it's debt, it can simply print more and more money and use it to pay the interest of the debt. He said that inflation would be a better choice than reducing public sector, because it only takes away money from INDIVIDUALS. Public sector provides services to everyone free of charge so it is more important than personal rights. I asked him while shocked that doesn't he agree that taxing somebody is actually ethically wrong? He answered: "No. It's because money is only numbers, not property." After this discussion I felt like tearing my eyeballs out with a fork. How can somebody just smile and say something like this? Please share your thoughts and opinions, as I would REALLY like to hear them! Markus FIN