In this essay, I'm going to politely disagree with LRH on freeloader debt. You're free to disagree with me if you like. It won't change my opinion.

I have twice accumulated freeloader debts with the Church. The first time, I paid the debt, as it wasn't that large. I was single, I didn't have a lot of other debt, and the freeloader debt wasn't that large-- just a few thousand dollars.

The last time I had to walk away from the Church, my wife and I ended up with an aggregate debt of about USD 126,000. Unfortunately, our separation from the Church wasn't necessarily voluntary. Our debt encompassed a considerable amount of admin training.

Now, as a former Treasury Secretary, I'm intimately familiar with freeloader debt policy. I know how to figure the debts, and I've collected on a few. The policy involved says, more or less, that you owe for ever course you received during the course of any incomplete employment contract with the Church. No compensation for years actually completed, no discounts, no nothing. There's no getting off easy with freeloader debts. Now, my experience with this is based on the original LRH freeloader debt policy, not any later policy, perhaps dreamed up by someone else, if such a thing exists. LRH was quite clear what he expected along this line.

Now, if you were never in intensive training within the Church, your freeloader debt might not be that large. It so happened that my wife and I were on intensive training for a while.

By the way, one other rule about intensive training with the Church. If you are privileged enough to be sent off or receive such a thing, you're first required to sign a new five-year employment contract, so the Church can obtain a reasonable period of return service for their investment in you.

I should also, in the interest of full disclosure, that toward the end of my formal association with the Church, I worked with "Int" to whittle down my debt (without me paying it) to a few thousand dollars, part of which I paid. What policies they were following to bring USD 126,000 down to a manageable few thousand dollars was a complete mystery to me. One thing I am certain of-- no policy of LRH was involved. Whatever policies they were using to reduce my debt was pure black magic, and not anything LRH would have endorsed.

In any case, consider a debt of that magnitude. That amount of money is about the value of a small house in most of the suburban markets of the U.S., perhaps slightly less. Now, a house is normally the largest debt that anyone will ever carry, and it is normally put on a payment schedule of 30 years. It's not an inconsiderable amount of money.

Now imagine separating yourself from the Church, voluntarily or involuntarily, and being left with a debt of that magnitude. Consider your frame of mind with respect to that debt. Your first thought will be, you'd like to pay that debt, but realistically, you never will. If you walk away from the Church and go back to work for K-Mart, and like most people you end up with a mortgage, car payments, living expenses, kids' college bills, etc, how are you going to pay for what is essentially a second house?

You're not. But here's the big dilemma. If you don't pay that bill, you don't get back on the Bridge. It's more or less requisite that you pay freeloader debts off in full before you're allowed back on any service in the church. So one of the things that will go through your mind is the fact that, barring you winning the lottery, or coming up with the Next Big Thing on the Internet, you're never going to be able to pay that bill, and you're never going to be able to get back on service again. My wife and I both went though this, were of a mind that unless something extraordinary happened to our income, we'd never be about to get back on the Bridge.

Now, I fully understand Ron's reasoning for setting freeloader policy as he did. However, consider this: if the Church was willing to invest that much money in me for extensive training (or auditing), then I must be worth more to the Church than the average Joe out there. I don't say this to pump up my own ego. But the fact is, you don't send your Letter Registrar off to do the full OEC and come back as the Letter Registrar. I went through a considerable battery of tests before my Org considered me worthy to receive six months to a year's worth of training. It's just a fact that, normally, when you send someone off for training like that, you don't just pick the next person in line for it. I didn't agitate for doing this training and in fact was a little reluctant when they wanted me to go off to train for six months to a year and come back to new five year contract.

So hopefully, if you're an Org, you send your best and brightest off for full time training and manage to hold on to them for a full five years after that. But it happens that it doesn't work out that way, and these days probably more often than not. And the result is that you end up with a lot of folks in the field who were pretty fair hands in your Org and in Scientology, getting trained up for large sums of money, getting separated from the Church for one reason or another, and the Church will never see them again. Not only have they lost that investment, but they won't ever see that person in an HGC or courseroom again.

Is this really what LRH would ultimately want?

Now LRH might rant about "making it go right" and things like that, but the facts are the facts. In the real world, you'd end up with possibly a great number of people in the field who were well trained, but could never set foot in an Org again. Not only that, if you got any money out of the persons, it would be a pittance compared to what they owed. You could rant all day about "making it go right", but I doubt that would really have much impact in the long run.

Let's face it, what I've described above are the economic facts as they stand today. Perhaps at one time, the story was different. But we don't live in those times any more, and the above is the bald reality of it.

And so, I would move for a revisiting of the rules for freeloader debt. Part of LRH's reasoning on this was likely defensive: you couldn't have people coming in purely to get trained and then bailing once they had. If that ever occurred, it would likely be on a very small scale. And if that's your situation, you're not doing a very good job of qualifying your recruits in the first place.

Perhaps a system of discounting the debt in light of number of years worked might be in order. Or perhaps an upper limit to the debt, based on the economic conditions where the person separated from the Church (New York is a lot different than Round Rock, Texas).

I don't know what the answer is. But I can tell you the economic facts as they are, and the outlook isn't cheery. Of course, maybe I'm wrong, and maybe people who routinely rack up USD 100,000 plus in freeloader debt typically pay it off within ten years. But I doubt it.

If you'd like to look at another policy which would need to be changed based on current economic conditions, consider this one: Treasury policy dictates that if a vendor duns the Church for payment, the Church thereafter puts that vendor on what amounts to a "slow pay list". This policy was written way back in the days when LRH was working at old Saint Hill in England. Look at your own bills and imagine what might happen today. I routinely get bills due two weeks from the time I receive them, and if I don't pay them by the due date, I accumulate extremely high late charges. No questions asked. And if I make it a habit of not paying on time, my credit rating will eventually reflect this, and I may end up being turned down for my next mortgage or loan. That's the reality of today's economy. Of course, the answer is to always pay your bills on time. But if for some reason you can't or don't, then....