The Great Betrayal: Why Loans and Credit Cards Should Be Considered Criminal

Proverbs 22:7 : “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.”

In a just world, lending practices as we know them today would be illegal.

The entire system is built on a lie: that banks and credit card companies exist to “help” you — to extend a lifeline when you need to buy a car, cover an emergency, or pay for basic necessities. In reality, they are merchants of misery, extracting profits from the very people they claim to serve.

Here’s the ugly truth: when you take out a loan or swipe that credit card, the majority of what you pay back each month isn’t paying down your debt — it’s feeding their profits.

Interest payments are pure, unearned money for the lender. You work, you sweat, you sacrifice — and they collect, simply because they had more access to capital than you did. That’s not partnership. That’s exploitation.

Take a typical $10,000 credit card balance at 22% APR. You might pay $200 a month, but over the course of repayment, you’ll often hand over double or even triple what you originally borrowed. Meanwhile, banks market this theft as “empowering financial flexibility.” They sell you survival with one hand and steal your future with the other.

Psychologically, the effects are devastating.

Debt strips people of hope. It traps them in cycles of anxiety, self-blame, and desperation. When a person realizes that their minimum payments barely make a dent — that most of their sacrifice isn’t reducing what they owe — they lose trust not just in the system, but often in themselves. And that’s by design. A desperate borrower is a profitable borrower.

Meanwhile, the math paints an even crueler picture.

If you save $10,000 and invest it wisely in today’s market, you might earn 5–7% annually — if you’re lucky.

That’s around $500–$700 a year.

Compare that to the 22%+ lenders charge you for using their money. They’re making over $2,000 a year off the same $10,000 in debt they extended to you.

You can’t even come close to matching that return as a saver or investor.

The system is built so that your money grows slowly — but your debt to them grows rapidly. It’s not a fair exchange. It’s a rigged game.

If individuals lending money charged similar interest rates to friends or family, they’d be labeled loan sharks and prosecuted for usury.

But when banks do it? It’s called “business.”

Let’s be clear: credit and debt are not tools of empowerment. They are instruments of control.

They create artificial necessities — turning needs like education, transportation, and medical care into profit centers for billion-dollar institutions.

It is a moral failure that we allow debt to replace wages as the foundation of economic life. It is a social failure that we applaud people for “managing” their debt rather than questioning why they needed it in the first place.

If you want true freedom, the answer is simple:

• Spend less than you make.

• Save ruthlessly.

• Borrow only when survival demands it, not convenience.

  
  

  Because once you enter their system, escaping it is much harder than they ever admit.

We don’t need more financial products.

We need more truth.