If you imagine that everything is an exchange, then we're supposed to just transact and walk away. If we haven't walked away and we still have a relationship, it's because there's a debt.

If your father is an air-conditioner repairman from Nebraska, its conceivable that you might become a CEO, but you can't imagine being the drama critic for the New York Times. So if you come from a background like that and you want to actually have a career which involves doing something noble in the world, what can you do? You can join the army. That's about it. Or you can work for the church. That explains a lot of the focus of right-wing populism. The right wing figured that out, that people want enough to survive and to do good.

Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.

Debt is the most effective way to take a relation of violent subordination and make the victims feel that it's their fault.

Adam Smith actually took all his best ideas and lines from sources from medieval Persia. But one thing he doesn't take is the underlying assumption they have that the basis of a market is mutual aid.

All societies are based on a sort of minimum level of communism. Otherwise, you couldn't have any social relations at all.

People don't have an ongoing relation unless it's a form of debt because everything is an exchange, so ongoing relationships are incomplete exchanges, and therefore one party is probably to blame - more likely than not, both are. Sociality itself seems to become like a matter of sin, and inherently wrong.