"National Debt" is a Lie, Framed within a Misdirection, on a Plate of Deception, Garnished with Many Fallacies and Confusions

Why are we still having this discussion about "national debt"? Decades ago I was able to research this issue and found that issue of debt is artificially constructed~ That says a lot about the people who still haven't understood this.  In fact, it is obvious.  So why don't people understand the obvious?

Here and here are a couple of things to consider in this matter which reveal how important it is, because the matter of costs and debts are not a minor theme in large scale, and very perilous sorts of enterprises in your world today.

What is "debt"?  I'm not going to break out the dictionary.  But "debt" refers to the consideration which is prospectively extended to a person due to their granting something as collateral.  It is VERY simple if you understand the words in that sentence.  It isn't more complicated than that.  If someone thinks it is, they are simply deluded. That is all debt is, all it ever was, and all it ever can be.  It is just what I said here:  "The consideration which is prospectively extended to a person due to their granting something as collateral."
That's it. I'll allow it to be said that this is my proposed definition, but in fact it is the proper meaning of the term.  This is what I say "a priori"  Shall we test it with the evidence?

Wikipedia:

A debt generally refers to something owed by one party, the borrower or debtor, to a second party, the lender or creditor. The lender or creditor can be a bank, credit cardcompany, payday loan provider, or an individual. One country can also lend money to another country. Debt is generally subject to contractual terms regarding the amount and timing of repayments of principal and interest.[1] The term can also be used metaphoricallyto cover moral obligations and other interactions not based on economic value.[2] For example, in Western cultures, a person who has been helped by a second person is sometimes said to owe a "debt of gratitude" to the second person.

Google:

Collins English Dictionary (online) :

debt (dɛt )

Definitions
nounsomething that is owed, such as money, goods, or services
See bad debtan obligation to pay or perform something; liabilitythe state of owing something, esp money, or of being under an obligation (esp in the phrases in debt, in (someone's) debt)a temporary failure to maintain the necessary supply of something ⇒ ■ sleep debt, ⇒ ■ oxygen debt
Derived Forms ˈdebtless adjective
Word OriginC13: from Old French dette, from Latin dēbitum, from dēbēre to owe, from de- + habēre to have; English spelling influenced by the Latin etymon
SynonymsView thesaurus entry= debit, bill, score, account, due, duty, commitment, obligation, liability, arrears, money owing
= indebtedness,= indebtedness, obligation

It is part of the meaning, or rather derived from the meaning of Justice itself!  This for that! Quid pro quo! It is of the essence of social bonds, where people demonstrate consideration for one another as fellow beings. 

There is no economic modality of this unless there is first a psychological mode.  First people have to understand, have to be able to consider, one another's interests, and of course each must understand his own.  That is not possible the other way around.  It cannot be first some arbitrary economic activity, and slowly people started to add, over time, a psychological motivation and cognition to such things!  That's silly!

So we know that how to understand interests and obligations is a simple matter that is made complicated only be circumstances, but still yet remains the same in essence.  A simple computer is a complicated computer is a computer.

Debt is consideration by a person extended to a person due to their granting of something in collateral.  Yes yes, I know that collateral isn't used that way by most.  They don't understand the nature of debt in a clear way. 

What is primary is the expected return. Someone who has an interest in what they already have, does not want to merely lose it.  But for some reason they expect to get something in return for having it, which is almost by definition a "burden" of some kind. The want to offset the burden of their encumbering possession with an interest.  No point in carrying around an ax all day if you aren't likely to have use for it.  No point in doing truly useless things.  Even doing nothing is good in its proper context, as it isn't really "nothing", but is resting, or thinking, or reminiscing, or sleeping, or breathing/recovering breath, or some other such thing.  There is "no nothing".

So we see that there are pros and cons to all things which we evaluate in this way.  It offers us something up front (the collateral), but what it offers us comes with its own costs. Those are the "interests" of the collateral. Those interests incur debt. The debt must be paid. That is the Law.

Collateral is used to mean something put on the table as offered in case of default.  It is an offer of something that holds value for the lender though he'd rather have the agreed form of payment, but this is offered mainly as evidence that there is something to back up the agreement which will not leave the lender just hanging with nothing.  It shows good faith, that is its original meaning. It might even be worth more than the intended payment by the agreement.

But that's some weird sort of conceptual footbinding to use words that way, because it doesn't allow the language to express the heart of the matter in a way that is economical to its full meaning, and so this word's use will simply have to be repurposed, whether people like it or not. I don't owe them their preferred use, and they don't owe me any of their attention, and that's fine with me. My purpose is to understand the matter as it really is, not make pretentious people feel better about the sorry state of their knowledge, feelings about which are hurt merely because nomenclature wasn't nailed down they way they wanted it to be, however inane their paradigmatic "floor plan"!


Collateral means:

2.  Something pledged as security for repayment of a loan, to be forfeited in the event of a default.

That can be true.  Or it can mean what I mean when I say it is

1. Something that is pledged by a person on his own calculated expectation of a return, which he thinks is secured by that collateral.

It goes in the reverse direction as I use it, because collateral is not the main thing.  The main thing isn't the loan, but the DEBT.  Why? Everyone knows this is true!! That's the status quo, since legally and ethically society considers that the debt incurred is the main thing, it is the thing people are rather contentious about, by far more so than anything else in the matter when there is a default, and so the issue of debt is primary, and the loan is itself collateral offered to justify that debt.  Further, my definition captures the specious meaning of the common use of the term.  What is the "collateral" they are talking about except something pledged because he calculates that the endebtor will go through with the loan with that collateral added as consideration.  That IS collateral, but it isn't the case that collateral is only that.  A tool is a tool is a tool.  Collateral is collateral is collateral.  It is something pledged as consideration for the calculated return (the interest) of securing the loan. But that's all the "principle" is.  It is offered as collateral (it is secondary to the interests of the endebtor, clearly, or it wouldn't be used in this way but some other way) so as to secure some interest beyond itself.  That is literally what "principle + interest" amounts to.  Beyond the issue of whether or how that can be right or wrongly done, that is simply what it is.

What is the main thing for the "debtor"?  That's also not the loan, not the collateral the "endebtor" grants him, but rather his own interest in what that collateral helps him to attain. It might be that with just some little sum he could produce an invention worth far more than that little sum. See now why I put collateral, the "secondary thing" in its proper place?

Ponder these things, because they are rarely pondered, but they are VERY important. I say this because for decades the world has been practically, and openly mute about these things, and I'm just getting started flaying their bullshit version of events so as to expose the Truth about economic "reality", among all other aspects of "reality". In the next article I'll take this "lexicon for discussion" through some rather illuminating paces. There is a very mechanical, logical, specific, and paradigm-critical reason for my choosing to rearrange the use of terms in this way. It is really just a fine tuning of the use of the term so that it does double duty.  It will soon be extended to include the term "debt", "interest", "principle", and then considerations will proceed to many other economic matters which would be better resolved after this long-lived Methuselah of fraud, this fundamental misunderstanding and miscomprehension of debt, is finally brought to the justice of conceptual analysis.