Bankruptcy protects fake people, brutalizes real ones

Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid.

Cory Doctorow
10 min readOct 9, 2022

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A robotic hand wielding a gavel; the gavel is smashing the face of a terrified person.
Victor Bezrukov, CC BY 2.0 (modified) and Vitalik Radko/Deposit Photos, free license (modified)

Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid.” There, in eight simple words, we have Michael Hudson’s key insight into the role debt and debt cancellation plays in the rise and fall of human civilizations.

Debts are inescapable.

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