> We don't owe this money to some foreign planet with a death-star pointing at us It's borrowed from the future. Literally, we owe the money to our future sel

> We don't owe this money to some foreign planet with a death-star pointing at us It's borrowed from the future. Literally, we owe the money to our future selves, like in human race. To oversimplify it, we expect that the productivity (ie. the amounts of material possessions and services that are available to humanity as a whole) will grow in a geometric rate. Those future money are an instrument on how this growth is to be directed, basically relying on the wisdom of the crowds to determine investment strategies. The opposite - direct planning of growth - was vastly tested (in communist countries) but it didn't go anywhere.