The State - Strangers who throw all your money into a bottomless pit

If we are on a sinking wooden boat and all we have is a captain and all that captain has is a great big hammer with a bucket full of nails; expect to hear nothing but the sound of banging, battering, clobbering, pounding, pummelling, thrashing, trouncing, walloping and whacking - in that order!

The captain will tell you this is all his men can do. But you know: the weight of all these nails is going to sink that darn boat anyway, regardless. The boat is sinking, you are on it and it is miles from land. And the funny thing is the ones who are doing all the hammering, having holed the hull in the first place, are the only ones with life-jackets on, indeed with your life-jackets on.

What are you going to do? Push those fellows with the hammer in the sea and tip their bucket of nails in with them too. I reckon with a little luck we could make it to the shore - this is, after all, a wooden boat.

Here is another thing. If you owned a money printing machine, not fake money but real money, would you ever be broke again? Only if you were really very stupid. And would you give that machine away on the agreement that you will instead pay interest for any of the money the machine printed. Only if you were very stupid again.  Or fundamentally corrupt.