Why the War on Interest Is a Just War
For most of human history, charging interest to someone in need was considered a moral failure. Every great tradition said so. The Torah forbade it between brothers, Aristotle called money breeding money "unnatural," Rome capped it, the Church banned it outright, and Islam forbids riba to this day. Our ancestors across every civilization looked at the same arrangement, profiting from another person's lack, and reached the same verdict.
Modern finance asked us to forget all that, and we did. The result is on the clock at the top of this page. The United States government now pays over a trillion dollars a year in interest: $1.05 trillion net in fiscal 2026, more than the $965 billion it spent defending the country, roughly one of every five tax dollars collected. It does no work, builds no road, teaches no child. American households pay another $1.19 trillion a year on top of that. Interest is now one of the largest industries in America, and its product is nothing.
And it does not fall on everyone equally. Interest is the only major expense that charges you more for having less. The family with savings pays cash and pays nothing. The family without pays over 22% on a card, or 35.99% backdated, on the same refrigerator. Compound interest is a one-way pump: it moves money, quietly and perpetually, from those who have little to those who have much. A worker can out-hustle a bad boss and outlast a bad economy, but no one out-earns a compounding debt. That is why debt has been the instrument of servitude in every age, and why jubilees, the periodic cancellation of debts, are as old as civilization itself.
The two horns: interest and insurance
Interest does not work alone. Lenders require insurance before they will lend. Insurers make their money investing your premiums and collecting interest on them. The same credit score sets the price you pay on both sides. And the person in the middle, you, pays both before a single product or service is delivered. Tap a strand to see how the web holds you.
Each strand will link to its own sourced explainer as our research publishes. Until a strand carries a source, read it as our argument, not established fact.
The way out
We are not naive. Credit exists, and used ruthlessly it can serve you. That is exactly the point of this war: interest is a choice sellers made, and avoiding it is a choice you can make. Every manufacturer subsidizing 0% financing, every card offering 21 interest-free months, every honest equal-payment plan is an open gate out of the system. Businesses that compete on the product instead of the financing win the sale. The lenders' only hope is that you don't know the gates exist, or that you walk into the ones that are traps.
So this is the whole strategy of the war on interest, and it is winnable one household at a time: never pay interest; make them pay to lend to you. Take the 0% and bank the difference. Flag the deferred-interest mines for your neighbors. Pay off the window before it closes, every time. The counter never stops running. But yours can read zero, forever.
What we argue, and what we can prove
We call interest and insurance, as practiced today, financial terrorism against ordinary households. That is our position, stated plainly. The numbers underneath it are not opinion: every figure on this site links to Treasury, Census, BEA, CFPB or the lender's own terms, so you can check them yourself. Where we make an argument, such as that a long interest-free stretch would let the economy heal, we present it as our case, built from the record, and we will answer the strongest objections to it in the open.
Solutions are coming, including interest-free paths to owning a home. A newsletter and community launch soon, so you can follow along and share what interest and insurance have cost you.