Topic: USURY is it good or bad or neutral ? (Read 6127 times)

Har har.  Telling me what I believe again; after you read those books that I cited under "book club" you'll have a closer understanding of what I stand for, although not fully inclusive of what my positions are.  Outside of the areas where government should intervene government should not intervene; it's just that the government we presently have does almost nothing for the public interest so what I'm proposing might seem like a sudden shift, but in historical reality it's largely things that the government has done in the past and should do presently.

To say that "all of Niemivh's economics [rationalizes interventionalism]" isn't even remotely true - once again the litmus test is as I said before: "What further mobilizes the total productive and technological potential of the nation for the advancement, progress, happiness and welfare of the people of this state and the world".  Where the private sector with the present regulatory structure is generating value, progress or otherwise a socially useful function then, great.  Fantastic.  Have at it, hoss.  Enjoy your success, you deserved it.  It's where they insist on parasitizing the public or otherwise promoting something cancerous that I would do what I can to inveigh against it.  Unfortunately in our degraded present condition, that means doing a lot.

Certainly all of niemivh's economics does. There are other schools.

Are you using the convenient Milton Friedman definition of "Government" with regard to England's central bank?

That is, that the central bank of England (or the USA for that matter) is private when it's convenient to consider it private and public (governmental) when it is convenient to consider it in that light?  Because that appears to be what you are doing. The main story behind this LIBOR scandal (which is being buried from BoE's involvement) is the cartel of the major banks and the anti competitive agreements they were privy to.

A government can set that rate and causes inefficient economic calculation and then boom! you get a bust (obviously after the boom)

Governments can do whatever they want. They can set rates for all sorts of stuff and they can even set what information is learned even without censorship, but just by paying for certain professors that expand governments beliefs...Maybe thats why all of economics has to do with rationalizing interventionalism instead of doing what its supposed to.

*yawn*

Nice rhetoric.  Meanwhile, back in reality, outside the Libertarian Ivory Tower.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/british-official-defends-central-banks-role-in-interest-rate-scandal/

And the newbie knocks it out of the park! Good definition.

Interest is the price of time. Very simple.

Good bad or neutral? For whom? (had to) For the people CHOOSING to do so...it can only be good

Tell that to the Bitcoinica guys...they're getting to use all their customers money for free!! ( I think the hack was an inside job )

True. Lots of so-called "Islamic" banks end up allowing what is essentially customers selling something to the bank and then immediately buying it back on an installment plan.

I agree with this post, generally, but the focus on interest (riba) by the Koran obscures the greater problem.  The JudeoChristian focus on usury as interest does likewise.  By doing so, the banksters can still get their risk free gains by other means, simply by calling it something different.  For example, the charging of interest for loans denominated in gold in the US has long been illegal, simply because govco doesn't want to imply that gold is still money.  So gold is no longer 'loaned' at 'interest'; instead it's 'leased' at a 'rental rate'.  The end result being exactly the same.

Are you familiar with Alan Watts? He said the exact same thing about inches and building a house.

It's not really the "price of money", but compensation for the opportunity cost of not being able to spend that money. The ability to use some currency over a period of time has value, hence a price in the marketplace.

Without a price you get scarcity or surpluses, basic supply/demand economics. In the case of 0 interest rates, there will be a shortage of capital. Business' that really need the liquidity and are willing to pay for it are starved of this opportunity because any old fool with a plan has already taken the free loan. It's basically price fixing and fails for the same reason as with any other good or service.

Usury is not the problem. The compounding of it is.

It was Greek.

As for professional translators, KJV agrees with my amateur translation, and most people tend to look at it with particularly high regard. The commentary here is interesting - some suggest that "of all evil" is simply hyperbole for rhetorical effect, others suggest that "τῶν" should be translated as "these", referring to the "foolish and hurtful lusts" from Timothy 6:9 ("But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition."). I can accept the latter argument, since "all evils" would be just "πάντων κακῶν" without the article.

I think there's a legitimate concern that these translations are heavily politicized in that sentence, and they do disagree with each other in this regard, which is why I think looking at the original is the only way to make any kind of ultimate decision. The idea that the love of money is not literally the root of any evil conceivable is probably correct though.

In principle, I'm entirely in favor of this practice. (Which is why I have invested as much as I am able to in IBB) Of course, I am not in favor of forcing people to do it this way. If it is better (as it, at least on the surface, clearly is) then it will win in the market, no force required.

I mean, if people want to pay 15% interest when 0% is available... who are we to stop them?

This is far from an accurate description of bankruptcy proceedings.  And there are a number of different versions of bankruptcy that runs the spectrum from total default to partial liquidation of defautor's assets to simply the court ordered extension of repayment period.

I'm not sure, but Timothy may have originally been in Aramaic, not Greek.  Either way, the transalation is  matter of opinion and I hold the opinion of the professional translators for the New American Standard in higher regard than I do yours.  No offence.

Opponents of usury, particularly in the Islamic school, don't necessarily come from an economic position that denies the time value of money. Rather, the argument that is often raised against lending at interest comes in two parts:

1. It creates a moral paradox between the responsibility of the creditor and that of the debtor
2. It leads to the poor overleveraging themselves and effectively functions as an anti-insurance policy.

The first argument basically asks the question: whose fault is it if the borrower defaults? One side of the coin is the it's all the borrower's fault; he made a promise to pay the money back, and promises should be kept. The creditor was defrauded, ie. stolen from, and we should feel sorry for him as a victim of this crime. However, this position is very problematic: it denies all responsibility to the lender and effectively creates a paradox in capitalist economic philosophy: you have an investment that generates a guaranteed fixed rate of interest with zero risk. All other businessmen trying to earn a return from their capital must take care to ensure that their funds are used wisely, but the lender has no such concerns. There is no mechanism built into the system to reward more careful creditors for their prudence and punish less careful creditors for their oversights. All debt enforcement systems must somehow come to terms with this fundamental problem, and some sort of balance between debtor responsibility and creditor responsibility is reached - in our society through the bankruptcy mechanism. Emphasizing exclusively debtor responsibility is impossible because if a creditor tries to shake down a nonpaying debtor too hard the debtor will simply die, at which point any further persuasion is physically impossible. Emphasizing exclusively creditor responsibility is actually possible - essentially, it would be a world where the only reason to repay a loan would be to encourage banks to lend you more money in the future, but without at least a moral component to their backing such debts would be far too flimsy to be practical.

The second argument is from the point of view of the debtor. If someone borrows money to upgrade the equipment for their business, buy more energy-efficient home appliances, establish a new location for their store, or perform whatever action that generates greater future returns for smaller present expense, they haven't just given themselves a temporary boost in capital. They've also increased their risk. The problem is that while the present expenses are guaranteed, the future returns are not. There could be bad business conditions which would, in retrospect, make the spending not worth it, the physical capital created or bought with the loan may be destroyed by a disaster, or anything else could happen. Consider two businessmen, whom we'll call A and B. Let's say A and B both have $10000 in the bank, and over the course of a year their business would take up some expenses and generate some revenue, leaving them with, at a 95% confidence level, between $5000 and $30000 at the end of the year - it'll probably be profitable, but something bad could potentially happen.  Now, let's say B decides to get a loan for expansion, agreeing to receive $100000 now and pay $106000 at the end of the year. With this loan, B's business doubles in size. What does the probability distribution for B's balance sheet look like now? At the top margin, profits increase from $20000 to $40000, adding the original $10000 and subtracting interest gives a final balance of $44000. But what if B gets the short end of the stick this year? The loss of $5000 would become a loss of $10000, and the interest payment on top would leave B with -$6000 at the end of the year - in short, in a debt trap.

What Islamic and other anti-interest thinkers promote as an alternative to debt is any kind of system where the creditor's return, and therefore the debtor's fee, is based not on a fixed sum but on the success of the debtor. Purchasing shares in a business is great, as if B gets his capital that way he can pay, for example, $12000 if the business does well that year and leave his investors with even a slightly negative return if the business does poorly. For consumer credit, informal arrangements between friends are ideal, as the economics of owing and receiving favors take circumstance and need into account. At a somewhat higher level of formality, an interest rate of 0% plus a voluntary tip is the norm.

Our current system does have some creditor responsibility in the form of the bankruptcy mechanism, but the problem with this is that the level of creditor responsibility is not fluid - it's an either/or, pay in full or utterly default, situation. Such unbalanced reward mechanisms create what's known as a Taleb distribution for the creditor, where the risk distribution appears to be stable, as the creditor is getting the same return from the system no matter what happens, but this leads the creditor to eventually forget the looming risk of total failure - losing everything to defaults. When there are many millions of debtors the distribution appears to even out, but one of the issues that people who understand Taleb distributions point out is that society is more connected than we think - if the risk of default is 1%, the risk of all 100 people defaulting is much higher than 10^-200, because defaults both lead to chain reactions and have common causes. The housing bubble can be seen as a case of creditors taking the illusory certainty of their returns for granted and suffering for it (okay, in reality they barely suffered at all, and the libertarian interpretation of Taleb distribution theory is that government-enforced stability mechanisms like FDIC and bailouts create a Taleb distribution themselves, which I'll leave others here to debate). Islamic theorists, or rather an Islamic-inspired anti-interest ideology that takes into account the much more modern work of Nassim Taleb, would argue that much greater stability can be achieved if the system is designed so that all parties involved in a credit transaction suffer the consequences of a failure in a graduated way.

I'll see your New American Standard and raise you the original Greek:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/gnt/ti1006.htm#010

Specifically:

ῥίζα γὰρ πάντων τῶν κακῶν ἐστιν ἡ φιλαργυρία

Literally = "for the root of all the evils is the love of money".

Any Ancient Greek scholars want to explore this one further? Dictionary is here if you want one: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=r%28iza&la=greek#lexicon

Hmm. This is not the answer I expected. I expected a fairly straight-forward "no" for the first one, and "yes" for the second.

Now, admittedly, I know only enough about loan financing not to get cheated myself, so perhaps I gave poor examples of using clever math to cheat the borrower. Perhaps the question should have referred to the contract, rather than the math itself.

In my opinion, a loan made in bad faith would be very hard to prove, as you mention. Even if the lender is malicious, I don't believe he wants the loan to fail. What he wants, rather, is to convince the borrower that it is a better deal than it really is. That might be easier to prove, by careful examination of the loan contract. A clear and simple contract, easy for the borrower to evaluate the "price tag" on his money is clearly not predatory, where a confusing contract, with fine print and misleading terms, is questionable, at best.

I don't consider the actual interest rate the defining factor.  If you're giving a loan of only 3% to someone you know is a gambling addict & accepting his house as collateral, it's arguablely predetory lending.  Particularly if he has a wife & kids that live in that house who had no say in the house being used as collateral for the loan.  Granted, the gambler has his own contributions to the fraud, and it's not a fraud if there was no way that the lender could have known in advance that his customer was likely to default.  The key is, would a reasonable third party be able to tell, in advance of the finalization of the contract, that the defaulter was likely to default under the conditions, whether or not that was his intent.  The valid goal of both parties is to repay the loan according to the terms.  If either party is being deceptive, and expects the loan to fail in some other way in advance, fraud was committed even if it cannot be proven to a third party (court).  If it was the lender using predatory practices, it's usury.  If it was the borrower, it was another kind of fraud.


Again, see above.  And compounding interest every 30 seconds is irrelevant.  One can compound continuously, if the APR remains proper.  Yes, it's possible to compound continously and do so fairly; many corporate/business loans work this way.  But the math is even  more complicated, so using continueous compounding in a consumer loan is suspicious, if for no other reason that it's difficulty for the lender to compute properly makes them uncommon.

thank you for pointing out the origin of my common misquote. in my defense i argued earlier that it was what you could do with money that was the motivating factor and certainly power over others is one such use (in my opinion) also i read that" i should keep my economics out of politics" sorry but not possible, read Marks! reg ps also Rouseaus said "every act is a political act" within which I would include economic acts.

Now this is an interesting point. Would you say that a loan that had a high interest rate, but was clearly explained, would be usury?

What about a loan that had a low apparent rate, but by clever use of mathematics, say, compounding the interest every 30 seconds, had a deceptively high return?

That is a common misquote of a biblical passage, that is improperly used to demonize money.  The literal translation of the passage is...

"For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs."

1 Timothy 6:10 New American Standard Bible


The emphasis above is my own, but note that the meaning of the passage is completely different.  The "love of money" is greed, "a root"  & "all sorts" imply greed is one of several and "by longing for it" implies that money is the object of the sin of greed, but not the sin itself.

Money of any form is simply a symbol, it is neither good nor bad upon it's own, no matter what form it should take.

EDIT: the passage also makes clear that there are certainly kinds of evil that do not have their root in the "love of money", I suggest that the love of power is a close second.

Interesting question. 

The debate between usury versus free market interest rates has a disagreement between sides that is often unstated, so let me state it.

Usury is when a loan is predatory, but has historicly been linked to interest.  It's forbidden in both the Old testatment (Torah) and the Koran because the average Joe/Mohammad was mathmatically illiterate for a long time even in cultures that the general population wasn't actually illiterate.  This is the real reason that, in our modern world, we teach young children arithmatic (and why we should teach them microeconomics) in grade school.  So when they get older they stand a chance of not getting screwed by someone with a much better understanding of mathmatics.

However, in a true free market, we should reasonablely be able to assume that your average consumer isn't mathmaticly illiterate; and even if he is, use of mathmatics to defraud anyone is still fraud.

Therefore usury is a special case of fraud, that pretends to be legitimate via the creative and/or deceptive use of mathmatics to present itself as an honest contract.

As a libertarian who understands, and supports, free market economics; I shouldn't have to argue against usury, because it's not a legitimate example of a free market contract to begin with.

Technology exists.  Therefore your argument is fallacious.

LOL, citing a book that is a cartoon-novella using fish as currency that has a caricature of FDR so blatant that they didn't even bother to put any creativity into it.

I lulled, thanks, that literally made my day.

 

Do I need to insert the Money Speech from Atlas Shrugged here?

I love money, but only the real kind.

The concept of "usury" is just plain ignorant. People are free to contract - period.

Exactly. Let the market decide what the true cost of getting money is (and to the Islamic banking proponents, I would point out that the customer is part of the market), and we will have the right amount of lending, at the right rates.

Altruism only goes so far.  Interest & credit scores allow you to trust people you don't know (or care about).  And the gaining value of BTC is a moot point because I could just not loan you out the money & still receiving that gain in value.  But above all of that, I don't think interest is the root of our financial problems.  In fact, I think the FED's control over interest rates is a large reason for the problems we have today.  Too low, risky lending.  Too high, not enough lending.  Both cause problems & both are caused by someone setting the rate instead of the market place.

yes, with fiat you would certainly get the same or less back because of QE and similar schemes. But with BTC over the last few month at least you would have got more back. For you "interest is the incentive" not altruism as is another approach! Risk is the criteria that causes most worries. That is why current systems need KYC or similar. However you are not opposed to a good credit score and within an anonymous system that may be the answer. But repeating an example of the current systems operation where everyone is charging each other interest and everyone wins is simply disingenuous because look where we are now? reg 

Why would I lend you money (with dollars or BTC) if I got the same or less back?  There's just no incentive.  Interest is the incentive.  Although not necessarily the case with fiat currencies, BTC/gold will appreciate w/o me lending it out & risking not getting it back.  Interest is how I offset the risk that you won't pay me back.  If you have a good credit score, I can charge less interest because I will most likely get my money back.  If you have a bad credit score, I can charge a lot of interest because the changes are greater that you won't pay me back.  It is basic economics.  There is nothing negative about it.  If I get a new job far from home & can't afford a car, it is beneficial for me to borrow the money for the car because I will still net a profit after paying the interest.  The lender will also benefit because they will get more than they lent out back.

leaving religion out i have used this service and only repaid what i borrowed. admittedly a small amount for a short period. it  was a social service and appreciated- however the lender got more back than lent because of appreciation which is not interest!. given BTC limit and potential  increased usage would this not always be the case and does this not avoid usury and limit gain to increases in BTC exchange rate? reg

Perhaps I wasn't clear: it's like saying that the unit of mass (an abstract concept) has to have a known mass. See, it is such a silly idea when you apply it to mass or length or color or anything else, yet most people are brainwashed into being comfortable with the same idea when it comes to money. They don't even stop to think for a moment before talking about the "price of money". What would you think of someone telling you "sorry, can't continue building this house, I'm out of inches"?

Well, aside from the fact that having a known mass for "gram" is vitally necessary for proper scientific measurements, what he was saying is that it's not the price of money, per se, but of lending, ie, getting money. Islamic banking refuses interest, going on a "If you appreciate this service, pay what you want" model. It seems to work pretty well, but even though they don't call it interest, it basically is, just with the borrower setting the terms, instead of the lender.

This amounts to saying that the unit of mass we call "gram" has to have a known mass, or that the word "inch" has to be written in certain  length. Money is what we use to measure value, just like we use inches to measure length. In both cases it helps us compare and exchange things more easily.

 Debt does allow for more complex human interactions, even to the point of a hive mind greater than the 120 person limit that we have in tribal setups. 

If considering humans as machines, capable of perfect double entry accounting, there is no problem.

However, there are a so many of cognitive errors that debt is involved in.

Addiction & the inability to calculate compound interest are just 2 problems. Are there any here that aren't related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases ?

Putting a readied syringe next to a recovering heroine addicts bed... well they have a choice don't they, but it's not nice, no?

 The whole debt thing has it's roots in religion way back from year dot.

The other thing I'd say is that having the debt contract open ended is also bad. That is, if you write a contract, the end of term should be clear. With debt as we have today it's a rolling percentage. 2 strikes of bad luck and how do you keep up? Years ago you could take these people as your slaves, or their daughters. Now after a lot of bloodshed (what people don't appreciate), we now have the bankruptcy, insolvency process to stop people killing each other over it. What if the contract was clearer from the start (if X, than Y) so that if it hasn't been paid back in X years then the collateral is taken and the saga is over.

Also, debt is the mechanism of war. Looking at many wars we can see an element of it. Germany's debt WWI & WWII, Napoleon, the US civil war, the kings debt in the British civil war, it's everywhere.
Today we're on a GDP growth treadmill where we have to work harder and harder to avoid war.

Is it really worth it?

I would much prefer to get away from morals and argue mechanisms but that just doesn't seem to work. Talking about how it's killing everyone and putting everyone at loggerheads with everyone at least puts us on the same page. "I, as debtor wish to reconcile with my debtee, we are both the victims of the same problem"


I'd like to see a lot more talk of psychology, network theory and the history of debt in this thread, talking like engineers solving a problem rather than pontificating labeling arm chair politicians.

yes, living well beyond any reasonable assessment of our means on debt is not a good thing to do. Does that mean charging interest on money lent should be morally reprehensible and/or not done in general practice?

no.

One reason for this is that it is possible (not only that, it is easy) to live within your means and take on debt.

it would only be a false premise if what I said was wrong. however a closer reading points out that the play I mentioned directly addresses this exact point. So we are both correct in fact. yes it was ok for jews to lend to non jews but not other jews since they considered themselves christians ie; the chosen people. However I am not familiar with inter religious views and cannot argue reliably but at this low level of economic activity usury was not of itself harmful. however returning to my point, generating interest from lending money grew to such a large extent it became debt. As has been pointed out this is why we are in trouble now. Making debt morally acceptable causes a posative reinforcing model of economics dependent upon growth. Nowadays we wonder how states propose to solve their indebtedness by guess what- borrowing more money at greater rates of interest. My point again- isn't living well beyond any reasonable assessment of our means on debt morally reprehensible? reg

wasn't it only immoral for christians and muslims to charge interest, and it was ok for jews to charge interest to non jews.

I think you labor under a false premise.

Please participate in my recent thread entitled 'Resources'. Your simplifications indicate a certain ignorance that desperately needs to be corrected.

The negative views toward usury stem from two things: 1) a misunderstanding what economic impact it can have, and 2) the question of its morality.

My comment above shows how it mistakenly becomes a sort of scapegoat for economic problems. As for morality I personally don't like usury, but don't have any problem with its use. The only time it becomes a moral issue for me is when the percentage charged ventures too high. I'd wager most would agree with that on a sliding scale. For me "too high" is anything over about 20%. But 1%, for example, wouldn't register as immoral to me at all.

Bitcoin addresses the inflation and debt interlinking that fiat has but you can still have HTC denoted loans so it doesn't address the usury problem.

Usury has its roots in religious leadership but I'd like to see a more scientific look at debt.

When I ask some people they sometimes say 'its just greed'. I don't accept that as a full explanation at all.
I believe that debt creates a different acting network and that network flows with natural bias. A business operating in gold and credit is a completely different thing to a business running in fiat and indebted to a bank. The business indebted is not answering to the government, but to the bank. the gov answers to the bank, not the other way round.

Religions have all insurrected against this effect in different ways. In Christianity Jesus went bat shit crazy in the money changing house so the Romans gave the death sentence, then we had a terrorist martyr.

the network is massive and it can seem like there is no escape. but if you trade your service for btc you've immediately
 freed yourself from the system and if things collapse around you that can carry on.

The whole thing happens again and again throughout history and its been going on since before the Egyptians. why ignore it? why not study it?

I don't believe debt creates wealth I. the long term. i believe overall it enables corruption and inefficiency. by creating a network and linking it to herd mentality all you do is create flow from which we can profit or loss by prediction, overall a destructive process. don't be fooled by those who try to direct your attention into certain isolated parts of the flow.

I think the moral issues don't stem from the practice of lending money itself.  I don't see any issue with that (and there are good arguments already in this thread of why it's in fact essential to an economy).  The moral issues are related to what you allow as collateral for a debt and what happens in the event someone is unable to repay a debt.  For example, I'd argue that it's immoral to allow a person to be enslaved when they cannot repay a debt.  Few people would probably disagree…however, the question of what constitutes enslavement is not so straightforward.  Lenders will just have to factor into their risk model that they cannot turn someone into a slave in the event they don't repay their debt.

And you would be wrong. That would be like saying guns are responsible for world violence, which is incorrect. Guns may certainly have an influence on the amount of world violence, but they are not the source. And of course violence is possible without guns.

So too would be our economic troubles without usury. The real source of our economic problem is debt as a basis for economic growth coupled with unsound (inflationary) money.

Nothing wrong with borrowing and lending. Unless you believe the Bible, in which case it is an abomination and one of the worst sins against God that can be committed. 

thank you- that's not sarcastic its a constructive comment. reg

I meant that the earth receive more energy from the sun then we use in one year.

electricMucus

So till we know how to prosper of our planet we should not use any means to unnecessary inflate resource usage that goes well together with charging interest.

yes. but to get from here where its almost blasphemy to suggest usury is harmful to convincing those who  live and prosper by it is not easy. suggesting "to desire is to suffer" is not a rallying call to most. a later point that subjectively you can have infinite growth is true because subjectively you can have anything you want - father christmas, fairies, utopia to name few but for pragmatists its harder. reg

Explain why it is possible then.

I say it's not, at least not real growth. (What would yield an increase in population)
Number games... there can be plenty, but even technological progress does not constitute growth.

You clearly don't understand the concept of subjective value, or why a infinite growth is possible within a finite world.

Ok enough already.

Yes because before the dark ages people were so rich, now we're all starving on the streets. Arf life is hard.

This is irrelevant.

It is no possible to have exponential growth for a infinite amount of time if the universe is finite. It may be infinite we don't know that for certain (anyone who does mistakes scientific theory for a fact.)
But the Earth is finite that's a fact.

So till we know how to prosper of our planet we should not use any means to unnecessary inflate resource usage that goes well together with charging interest.

ghaang noi

the love of money is the root of all evil..... money is not evil but to lust for it is where the fail is...

well this is more positive- perhaps I could  press you a little further and suggest whilst you are right that money itself (however it is denominated) is not good or bad it's what you can do with it that is sought. Satisfying wants over and above needs is the objective and i want to really know if we are trapped in a system where its always going to be a free for all of who can gain domination over another or is there some hope that enough people can see further and be perhaps more altruistic- after all I read recently that the good vibes from that help you live longer anyway? what do you think? reg

kiba
Also, economic growth isn't always about using more resource. It can be that we get more out of the current resource we have.
thank you kiba. yes I am aware of the truisms you have laid out. There is nothing in existence that has not always existed. Harnessing solar energy and gathering asteroids I would hope humans live long enough to see (as a species) I have my doubts but the above comment is a direction we should be thinking more about- in my opinion. reg

Gabi
Also on wiki i read money lending exist since the Roman Empire

Yes thank you for that. Again my point is (to coin a phrase) "money is the root of all evil". as we know all empires have so far fallen. The attempt in the early middle ages to curb usury may well have been in reaction to the devastation caused by the fall of the roman empire.  I know money lending will not stop because if you have a little more than you need right now why go and earn more by your own labor when you can lend at interest and get someone else to labor for you? I just can't see it as being morally justifiable! reg.

Did you know that the earth receive more energy from the sun then we receive in one year?

Did you know that some asteroid in outer space contains at least 1 trillion dollars worth of precious metals?

Also, economic growth isn't always about using more resource. It can be that we get more out of the current resource we have.

We should all become monks, take away womens right, give all our freedom to our overlrds cuz we are now all serfs (or slaves).
Thank you for your comment. Firstly it seems to me slightly sarcastic- I was hoping to discuss the point that sprinkling words like liberty and freedom through economic policies that have bought us to the position we are now is an obvious dichotomy (to me) where the mises school still advocates usury and private ownership of property! Secondly I only mentioned the lack of trust today is a pity. All the other abhorences of the middle ages (words that you have applied to me by association) are well rid of.  Thirdy I am through the first two stages of Ghandis proposition- first they ignore you- then they ridicule you etc. reg

+1

and

Usury let us exit from middle ages? Well then it isn't so bad!

Also on wiki i read money lending exist since the Roman Empire

Well then, there's your mistake.

Re: USURY
Today at 10:17:18 AM
   
Reply with quote  #4
Quote from: reg on Today at 09:51:45 AM
should it not be discouraged and considered morally reprehensible again? discuss. reg.

Absolutely not. Interest is the price of money. How is the market suppose to work efficiently without knowing this price? Such a suggestion could only be made by someone economically illiterate so please go and first read a few books and get your knowledge up to par before attempting to reshape the way a whole market works. You'll find a lot of free stuff here: www.mises.org and an excellent low level of understanding required piece you should read (watch) is here: How an Economy Grows and Why It Doesn't (by Irwin Schiff)

Thank you for raising the point I was hoping would come to the fore. I accept I may be economically illiterate but I have read Mises (who I consider to be plain wrong). My point- continual growth at any level (currently wanted to be 3% p/a per economy) is fundamentally incompatible with finite resources. Why because at the basic level stuff is the asset you barter and exchange with others. When the last grain of sand has been used as an asset -what then? refering to another comment about middle age morals (not religious but social) a mans word was his bond- not any more -what a great shame!. reg.

Aside from a couple other misspellings, your English is very good and the topic spot on. I agree, this is another valid way to look at the problem.

Assuming of course, manipulation of interest rates by interested parties.

Absolutely not. Interest is the price of money. How is the market suppose to work efficiently without knowing this price? Such a suggestion could only be made by someone economically illiterate so please go and first read a few books and get your knowledge up to par before attempting to reshape the way a whole market works. You'll find a lot of free stuff here: www.mises.org and an excellent low level of understanding required piece you should read (watch) is here: How an Economy Grows and Why It Doesn't (by Irwin Schiff)

thank you-spelling was also much frowned upon

Its "usury".

Usury (the practice of charging interest on lending money) was illegal almost everywhere and morally frowned upon until the middle ages (see a play by a little known English author  "William Shakespere!" called The Merchant of Venice) . I would argue that the fundamentals of our current economic malaise rest in it being legalised and bought into general use. Whilst not suggesting it be banned again-wishing to avoid legal and contractual problems at least in relation to bitcoin (a new economic approach) should it not be discouraged and considered morally reprehensable again? discuss. reg.