[ThrustVectoring]

It doesn't need a conspiracy - macroeconomic forces and demographics are more than enough. On a societal and generational scale, it's basically impossible to make things now and have them be valuable in the future. Roads crumble, machines break down, inventions become obsolete, and in general what you did thirty years ago is of no particular value today. The one small exception to this is deciding to pump oil out of the ground later instead of today.

So if saving real goods and services doesn't work, what does? You can make things now, and sell them to people for dollars or some equivalent promise of future goods and services. Then you can later redeem these for the stuff you need later.

Oh, and did I mention the generational stuff? Small family sizes and aging Baby Boomers means that there's huge pressure to turn today's resources into promises to give people stuff later. Hence, debt.

I'd actually prefer if a conspiracy was responsible for this. Economic forces make a lot more people work a lot harder to push back against changes. Price controls are a great case in point for this.