Is Usury a Sin?

Samseau said:
Inflation makes no difference to the inherit flaws of fractional reserve banking. For without inflation, you will quickly get deflation, as there the money owed will always be greater than the existing supply of currency.
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Can you reword this statement?
Inflation = getting larger, as in inflating a balloon.
Deflation = getting smaller, as in deflating a balloon.

Without an increasing amount of money you will get a smaller amount of money? I'm not following.

The standard for money, since the time of Christ until 1973, has always been gold, which is neither inflating nor deflating.
 

Five-Per-Cent​


Because I have ten thousand pounds I sit upon my stern,
And leave my living tranquilly for other folks to earn.
For in some procreative way that isn't very clear,
Ten thousand pounds will breed, they say, five hundred every year.
So as I have a healthy hate of economic strife,
I mean to stand aloof from it the balance of my life.
And yet with sympathy I see the grimy son of toil,
And heartly congratulate the tiller of the soil.
I like the miner in the mine, the sailor on the sea,
Because up to five hundred pounds they sail and mine for me.
For me their toil is taxed unto that annual extent,
According to the holy shibboleth of Five-per-Cent.

So get ten thousand pounds, my friend, in any way you can.
And leave your future welfare to the noble Working Man.
He'll buy you suits of Harris tweed, an Airedale and a car;
Your golf clubs and your morning Times, your whisky and cigar.
He'll cosily install you in a cottage by a stream,
With every modern comfort, and a garden that's a dream>
Or if your tastes be urban, he'll provide you with a flat,
Secluded from the clamour of the proletariat.
With pictures, music, easy chairs, a table of good cheer,
A chap can manage nicely on five hundred pounds a year.
And though around you painful signs of industry you view,
Why should you work when you can make your money work for you?

So I'll get down upon my knees and bless the Working Man,
Who offers me a life of ease through all my mortal span;
Whose loins are lean to make me fat, who slaves to keep me free,
Who dies before his prime to let me round the century;
Whose wife and children toil in urn until their strength is spent,
That I may live in idleness upon my five-per-cent.
And if at times they curse me, why should I feel any blame?
For in my place I know that they would do the very same.
Aye, though hey hoist a flag that's red on Sunday afternoon,
Just offer them ten thousand pounds and see them change their tune.
So I'll enjoy my dividends and live my life with zest,
And bless the mighty men who first - invented Interest.
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by Robert W Service

A poem that could be entitled, "The Libertarian".
 
N°6 said:
by Robert W Service

A poem that could be entitled, "The Libertarian".
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Ha! This shows how bad inflation is. He says a person could live in decent comfort for £500 a year, but now I think that number must be at least £200,000 to achieve the lifestyle he described, and at 5% you'd need £4 million in the bank. That's an increase of 40,000%! A pound was originally worth one pound of silver, which is about £300 today.

Also, he's right with the part at the end saying any working class person would be just as happy to live off the interest of their wealth and stop working if they had the chance.
 
Just gonna leave this one here for you, a nice overview for starters





My personal view on usury is the hardliner position. Interest = Usury. Not compound interest, not excessive interest, it's interest itself. Interest is the attempt to make money with money and that door will automatically be opened and immediately cause damage wherever there is interest.

What I have to push back on is the idea that a fixed standard, like the gold standard, would help in any way whatsoever.
Fixed standards are what got us into the banking regime we live under now. Fixed standards, in the presence of usury, rogue market actors or external shocks, inevitably cause credit scarcity. Credit scarcity, in turn, forces state or private borrowing from usurious actors. That's how we got the modern fiat, and that's how interest became more or less universally accepted in the wake of the Reformation.

Alexander Hamilton sometimes gets ripped into by Jeffersonians for his desire to establish a national bank, but a national bank is very much an institution meant to support healthy national sovereignty not undermine it. State authority over the currency makes it possible to reduce credit scarcity and get productive economic projects going without necessarily becoming slaves to those owning whatever fixed currency exists.

Ideally, a state either invests in economic activity based on political goals, or he acts as an interest-free credit provider for private citizens. For price stability, some of the money remains within circulation so has to correspond to the growing number of goods in the economy.
How to specifically manage that system is just a matter of political will and inductive knowledge about how different sectors interact.

Some people from the libertarian camp (which I guess a good portion of all of us have at least dabbled in) view fiat as the culprit of our political problems, but it's actually downstream of it (although, obviously, the fact that the populace gets financially castrated helps maintain the regime's power).
The mistake is to view politics in terms of ideology, meaning there are certain parameters of how to organize politics which will solve our problems, but that's just part of the Hebraic hamster wheel the news cycle keep us in.
Currency and tax are a core aspect of government authority, next to territorial sovereignty and judicial authority. They can be wielded in a good or bad way, based on the faith of the people ruled.

When there is broad agreement on what the political goals and their philosophical framework are, some sort of core political figure usually emerges, and will then have the need to have all the sophisticated tools of governance at their disposal. Abolishing the tools doesn't lead to good governance. In fact, it makes it easier for interlopers to capture positions of power for themselves. Evil people have an easy time cooperating when there are gains to be made. Good people usually need institutions to safeguard them.

PS: I also would like to, once again, shill the cozy.tv book club streams. Those boys do really high level discussions of primary historical writings on nationhood and economics.
 
Thomas More said:
Ha! This shows how bad inflation is. He says a person could live in decent comfort for £500 a year, but now I think that number must be at least £200,000 to achieve the lifestyle he described, and at 5% you'd need £4 million in the bank. That's an increase of 40,000%! A pound was originally worth one pound of silver, which is about £300 today.

Also, he's right with the part at the end saying any working class person would be just as happy to live off the interest of their wealth and stop working if they had the chance.
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I was just going to add that usury will enslave the usurer because £500 in the poet's day to live like a libertarian is what I can win on the horses in a day but I am not "economically attractive" to modern women due to hoeflation.

Usury was called sodomy by the ancients and the medievalists for a reason: sodomy is not just pederastry, paedophilia and homosexuality - it is pill sex and rampant hypergamy.


When the modern Left descries the widening gap between rich and poor and when the right decries the collapse of the middle class, what do the mean?

The legalised law of the exponential function.
 
Rax Moscow said:
Can you reword this statement?
Inflation = getting larger, as in inflating a balloon.
Deflation = getting smaller, as in deflating a balloon.

Without an increasing amount of money you will get a smaller amount of money? I'm not following.

The standard for money, since the time of Christ until 1973, has always been gold, which is neither inflating nor deflating.
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Inflation and deflation relate to the expansion of the money supply. The Gold standard was not the form of currency for huge portions of Roman history, and fiat can exist without usury. Romans for example would use less gold or silver in each coin, debasing the amount of metal in them, but still expecting the plebs to pay for the same amount.

Inflation through debasement was detrimental, but still nothing compared to the destruction of usury, which monopolizes money into the hands of the usurer.

Thus, since the usurer is collecting more money due to the law of exponential returns (e.g. 5% interest rate on everyone's loans means not everyone will be able to pay back those loans unless money is printed into the system), the usurer will continually amass more money than exists within the system, sucking up all money so there is a scarcity of money, which is deflation.

Conversely, if money is printed so that debts can be repaid, it results in a greater wealth disparity for the usurer at the top, which then can hoard even more currency, which means more money is in the system than before, which is inflation.

Therefore, with usury, mathematically there will always be deflation unless money is printed to satisfy excess debts, which causes inflation. Hence, there will always be deflation or inflation, but never a solid state. Doesn't matter if a gold standard is used.

A gold standard with usurer results in the banker hoarding all of the gold, and there will be a severe lack of gold to go around - extreme deflation of total gold in the system.

Hope this makes sense. The reason usury is such an effective scam is because most people cannot do the math to understand it.

Shaquilleoatmeal said:
If a man is in public and stares at a woman with lust, how does that relate to usury?
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Because that man isn't married, and can't afford to get married and have kids, because housing is expensive and jobs are scarce (since no one can afford to employ due to rising costs due to usury), and the women still want to have love but no one is trying to marry her so she dresses like a skank to get attention she normally would have found in a husband.
 
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