Biblical and other sources warn of dangers of debt burden.
Compounding debt is not a problem per se. The toxic problem has arisen when debt is combined with exclusive private ownership in the commons of land, and this now extends to Jake's point to private ownership of the means of production, which is increasingly in the form of Knowledge.
My take is that our principal problem has been in the nature of the enterprise models or legal and financial structures we use, and the fact that they do not "scale" well.
I think that big and pervasive unions may be as toxic in their effects on the economy and society as big and pervasive corporates, or a big and pervasive State. The problem lies in the very nature of organisations as institutions.
There are new structures becoming increasingly common in use, and which are complementary to existing structures. In my view these are capable of spreading virally and organically in a networked and non-hierarchical way through the use of partnership-based frameworks.
The change I see happening is evolutionary, not revolutionary. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
Unfortunately what we have now is a situation where the big and pervasive corporates use the big and pervasive state to implement violence on demand. Big and pervasive unions offer some checks and balances to that.
But unless organisations are limited by state sanction to a certain small size, any system will create organisations which attempt to dominate and grow beyond their niches.
The history of the political machines in the US makes interesting reading. They were usually run by individuals who managed their contacts and allegiances in person - but who managed to become de facto rulers of entire cities, able to define policy and legislation and promote or frustrate interest groups in line with their personal interests.
