September 7, 2026
Have you ever watched cars in motion and thought the wheel spokes were rotating backwards ? It's the stroboscopic effect that occurs when we sample reality at an inappropriate frequency, making the unreal appear absolutely real. Similarly, an illusion of self motion can make us feel like we are moving when we are not, and not moving when we are.
Most economists sort and sample data to produce explanations and sometimes projections. Unless they adhere to the Austrian school, many of these economists suffer academic stroboscopism. For example, 40 years of Japanese stagflation is well-studied in the United States. Yet, Harvard economists assessed in 2010 that, among other things, Japan's experience is not much of a warning, but rather a guide for Keynesians and MMT'ers. Their assessment in 2010 included this statement:
The Fed's balance sheet went from $900 billion to $2.4 trillion: it nearly tripled. [T]he Fed staff's memos on an exit strategy have already been written,"[the author] says, and now everything hinges on"gauging the timing on when it is appropriate to begin withdrawing the fiscal stimulus.
Yet, over 15 years later, what they predicted would go down, or at least remain level, went astronomically up, and the Fed's Balance Sheet looks like this:
Are we moving in the right direction ? A better question is are "we the people" moving at all?
A recent opinion piece by a Canadian in the Jerusalem Post suggests we being moved, herded, and corralled into a better meatgrinder, to better support unnecessary wars now and in the future. It is a call for the " US taxpayer to fund 'debt forgiveness for military service' to enlarge the US's standing army."
Co-dependence between Israel and the US has become a modern academic specialty. Grok says "no other single-country focus in the U.S. matches the Israel ecosystem on all layers at once-lobby + PACs + campus + houses of worship + dedicated university field + multiple think tanks + decades of bipartisan congressional lock."
This, a course of action published in Israel carries more weight than one might assume, because it often indicates the ongoing thinking in both capitols. Shared language and messaging matters. This indentured military servitude idea comes on the heels of a US government official stating to Axios that recent strikes on Iran were just "mowing the grass." Mowing the grass is an Israeli state metaphor for the murder of "excess" men, women and children, a population linguistically reduced and dehumanized into blades of grass on a manicured lawn.
The proposed "debt-forgiveness enlistment program" could help Trump and Bessent reset the US financial system, currently characterized by a boom-bust cycle on steroids, and unhinged nuclear brinksmanship in Washington and Israel. Crashing the massive AI/Data Center bubble, and the coming sell-off of those stocks among others, is expected to allow insiders to capture profits and assets, while the investment portfolios of cities, counties, corporations, retirees and working people lose 98% of their value. The buy high, sell low pattern of the digital Trump meme coin may have served as a test run for the multiple trillion dollar bubbles being manufactured and managed for purposes of a reset of the US dollar, likely into a digital format where debts may be erased on command, and permissions to access capital centrally and politically managed.
The US Government and its cronies need the elimination or repudiation of its debt (via war with creditors foreign and domestic and/or the destruction of the republic) without losing their own heads, property or power. Transforming a military draft into indentured servanthood in order to additionally "wipe out debt" is potentially quite elegant. Not only will a small amount private debt held by future "volunteers" be "paid back" by the government, absent a "draft" means those who dissent or disobey unconstitutional or immoral orders are just violators their own "voluntarily signed contracts."
Astoundingly, our modern authoritarian government has adopted the values of Lysander Spooner, when he put forth in The Constitution of No Authority, that "the Constitution, so far as it was [the founder's] contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children."
The law is whatever the state says it is, morality is the natural goodness of "mowing the grass" and a contract you sign with the government is, at least for the citizen, paramount and inviolable. One may quietly wonder which debtor class is more likely to abandon its debts - the one that owes the banks, or the one that owns the banks. Scott Bessent knows.
In any case, Israel remains remarkably interested in getting the US military to "man up." It is a small country constantly at war, unable to draft from the only population in Israel that is increasing. West Jerusalem presides over the significant welfare-dependent Haredi population, which produces seven new Israeli citizens per woman, each one subsidized and protected for life by a tax-paying class that is only producing 2.5 children per woman; children who, over time, are also far more likely than the Haredi to permanently emigrate.
Not so in the US. While having a lower overall birth rate than Israel, we have 40 times the people, many of whom can be made - notwithstanding younger generations refusal to enlist and their dangerously low opinions of Israel - to fight and die for Israel because their alternate future is stagflation and job loss, more and more debt, and a permanent condition of being one accident away from medical-induced bankruptcy. Military service already covers medical costs and the need for a "job;" covering personal and school loan debt is the missing leg of Uncle Sam's and Tante Shulamit's milking stool.
If the US Senate passes the 2027 NDAA as the lobbyists have written it, the IDF will be even more integrated with the Pentagon, US intelligence, US research institutions, and US weapon design, purchase and production. From Israel's perspective, the need for a large, disposable standing US army is undeniable, as they are already inside the US military-political ecosystem and can shape its use.
More insidiously, indentured military service is extremely attractive to a United States looking at continued global war and potential martial law at home. Standing armies, as we are reminded by every single founder, are always and undeniably incompatible with liberty.
The political planet of thugs and thieves creates false war rationales and steal us blind, hoping that our sampling time is limited, out of whack, or inappropriate for the speed at which change happens. We are expected to see things that are not there, and feel like we are moving forward, or moving backward, when, in reality, we are solid as a rock. The state, with its wars and financial crimes, is a grim entity with an even grimmer future. The state inevitably fails in its compulsions, often spectacularly. Never forget that we the people are the only part of this equation of spin capable of real motion, true strength, and moral agency.