Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

"The meaning of the Roman word libertas itself changed dramatically over time.  As everywhere in the ancient world, to be "free" meant, first and foremost, not to be a slave. Since slavery means above all the annihilation of social ties and the ability to form them, freedom meant the capacity the make and maintain moral commitments to others.  The English word "free", for instance is derived from the German root meaning "friend," since to be free meant to be able to make friends, to keep promises, to live within a community of equals....By the second century AD, however, this had begun to change.  The jurists gradually redefined libertas until it became almost indistinguishable from the power of the master.  It was the right to do absolutely anything, with the exception, again, of all those things one could not do." p. 203-4

Thesis/assumption: "Originally, human beings lived in a state of nature where all things were held in common; it was war that first divided up the world, and the resultant "law of nations," the common usages of mankind that regulate such matters as conquest, slavery, treaties, and borders, that was first responsible for inequalities of property as well." p.204

"This in turn meant there was no intrinsic difference between private property and political power--at least, insofar as that power was based in violence." 204

..allows us to understand precisely how Liberals like Adam Smith were able to imagine the world the way they did.  This is a tradition that assumes that liberty is essentially the right to do what one likes with one's own property.  In fact, not only does it make property a right; it treats rights themselves as a form of property...We are so use to the idea of "having" rights--that rights are something one can possess--that we rarely think about what this might actually mean."206

"This is the great trap of the twentieth century: on the one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't own each other anything.  On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt [to parents, to cultural tradition, to the state, to God] we can never truly pay.  We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities.  But it's a false dichotomy.  States created markets.  Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, as least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today."

Ever wonder why Christian fundamentalists can relate to their Republican financial elites?  Here's your answer, as explored by D. Graeber in Nietzsche's "The Gay Science" and the origins of "original sin":  When life is conceived as a "gift" and a debt..."finally, with the impossibility of discharging the debt, people also come up with the idea that it cannot be paid off ("eternal punishment")...until all of a sudden we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which martyed humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity: God sacrificing himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem--the creditor sacrifing himself for the debtor, out of LOVE (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor!"

"It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God's own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction."