Ghost courts are downstream of ghost money
Why modern justice thins as credit abstractions expand
This article began with an unexpected “aha!” moment.
A friend sent me an analysis of Magna Carta, usury, and the historical usurpation of power. What struck me was not the medieval detail, but a modern resonance: courts appear to be inheriting problems that originate not in law itself, but in the monetary system law is now required to serve.
That realisation reframed a recent experience of my own. I had asked the High Court to settle a Single Justice Procedure enforcement notice in the most literal sense — by producing the warrant that supposedly authorised it. Instead of settlement, the process quietly defaulted.
At the time, this felt peculiar. In hindsight, it was revealing.
I began to connect that experience with earlier work another friend had done on Raw Net Worth — a simple thinking tool for testing whether economic theories are even feasible, let alone attractive. How are dysfunctional courts reflecting erroneous thinking in economics?
Filtering both lines of thought together raised a deeper question: what happens to courts when they are required to enforce an expanding volume of abstract monetary claims that can no longer realistically be absorbed by the legal system’s finite capacity? Something has to give way!
This article is a synthesis of that question. It draws on historical analysis, economic invariants, and extended dialogue with ChatGPT and Grok (xAI). The core ideas are mine; the structure and clarity were stress-tested collaboratively.
What emerges is not an accusation, but a diagnosis. It helps explain why principles that once seemed foundational — such as habeas corpus, or the expectation that authority can always be shown — now fail at the margins of routine enforcement. Not because they are rejected in principle, but because the system no longer has the capacity to honour them without threatening its own continuity.
In simple terms: when a system becomes overloaded, it begins to burn legitimacy as fuel, much as the human body consumes muscle once readily available energy reserves are exhausted.
The sections that follow explain why.
You check your bank balance and see a number.
You receive a court notice generated by an automated process.
In both cases, something crucial is missing — and it’s the same thing.
What you’re looking at is not “money” or “justice” in any traditional sense. You’re looking at abstractions that function only as long as nobody asks too many questions at once. Increasingly, people are.
This article is about why money, courts, and legitimacy all feel hollow at the same time — and why that isn’t accidental, conspiratorial, or even primarily political. It’s structural.
Modern money is not substance, it is promise
We still talk about money as if it were a thing: cash, value, wealth. But modern money is none of those. It is ledger-based credit — promises recorded in accounting systems.
Your bank balance is not stored value waiting for you. It is an IOU backed by the expectation that, if necessary, the system will enforce that promise. Mortgages, student loans, government bonds, bank deposits — these are all enforceable claims, not settled assets.
Money works because enforcement is assumed.
Credit scales cheaply. Enforcement does not.
Here we reach the first hard constraint.
Ledger entries can multiply without physical limits. Balance sheets can expand almost infinitely, at near-zero marginal cost. There is no natural friction.
Enforcement is different. It depends on finite human and institutional resources: courts, officials, time, attention. It cannot scale arbitrarily.
This mismatch is not a policy failure. It is an invariant.
When promises multiply faster than they can ever realistically be enforced or settled, the system does not stop. It adapts.
When promises multiply beyond settlement reality
As credit expands beyond what can plausibly be discharged through income, assets, or production, claims begin to thin.
They remain formally valid. They still appear on balance sheets. They can be traded, priced, and leveraged. But they are no longer anchored to realistic settlement.
This is what I mean by ghost money: not fake money, not secret money, but claims that persist primarily because enforcement is assumed never to be tested in aggregate. Think of subprime mortgages before 2008 — valid on paper, unpayable in total.
The system remains liquid, but not solvent in a meaningful sense.
Courts are downstream of money
This is the inversion that explains much of what people sense but struggle to articulate.
Courts are not upstream moral arbiters hovering above the economy. Structurally, they are downstream of money. They exist to enforce abstract promises when voluntary compliance fails.
Debt is upstream. Enforcement is downstream.
As monetary claims proliferate, pressure shifts to the legal system to validate, process, and compel. When claims are manageable, this looks like justice. When claims explode, it becomes logistics.
What happens when enforcement is overloaded
When enforcement demand outstrips capacity, systems respond predictably.
Judgment gives way to procedure. Deliberation gives way to templates. Contestability gives way to defaults. Locality thins into centralisation.
High-volume debt courts batch cases like assembly lines. Administrative fines and penalties are processed automatically. Authority becomes procedural rather than personal.
This is not primarily corruption. It is load shedding.
The system does just enough to keep claims enforceable — not enough to examine them deeply.
The rise of ghost courts
At this point the parallel becomes unavoidable.
Just as ghost money preserves liquidity without settlement, ghost courts preserve enforceability without legitimacy thickness.
They are not imaginary courts. They are ontologically thin ones: institutions that exist just enough to validate claims, but not enough to sustain the older ideals of locality, accountability, and substantive judgment.
Historically, this pattern is familiar. Roman debt enforcement shifted from personal judgment to procedural asset liquidation as claims grew. Early modern revenue courts centralised authority to sustain sovereign credit. Modern administrative justice continues the trend.
Ghost courts are not a failure of law. They are an adaptation to credit saturation.
The hinge: enforcement capacity
Money and law converge on a single constraint.
Abstract claims can scale without limit. Enforcement cannot.
That mismatch is the hinge from which everything else turns. It is structural, not ideological, and not fixable by better intentions alone.
Once you see this, the simultaneous hollowing of money, courts, and legitimacy stops being mysterious. They are different expressions of the same overload.
What forces reality back into the system
In financial markets, abstraction breaks when someone demands delivery.
Paper silver works until someone asks for physical metal. At that moment, the system must reveal whether it is solvent or merely liquid.
In law, there is an equivalent move: demanding proof of authority rather than accepting procedural assertion. Quo warranto is one such mechanism — a legal “show your work” demand.
These are examples of constraint technologies: tools that force settlement reality back into abstract systems.
Overloaded systems do not welcome them.
Why evasion is the default response
When abstraction is preserving flow, exposure is dangerous.
So systems respond with delay, reframing, procedural sidesteps, silence, or rule reinterpretation. In markets, this looks like cash settlement, force majeure, or position limits. In law, it looks like jurisdictional fog and procedural deflection.
This is not proof of malice. It is what stressed systems do.
Revelation, not victory
Standing for settlement does not guarantee success.
What it guarantees is revelation.
It forces the system to disclose whether substance exists beneath abstraction. That disclosure — not punishment, not triumph — is the reset mechanism.
A systems diagnosis, not an accusation
This is not a story about villains. It does not require conspiracies, cabals, or hidden hands.
It is a diagnosis of what happens when abstraction outruns constraint.
Money thins. Law thins. Legitimacy thins.
People feel this not because they have been told to, but because they are living inside systems signalling overload.
Understanding that does not solve everything. But it replaces confusion with clarity.
And clarity, at this stage of the credit cycle, is already a form of power.