Oddbean

One of my favorite recent stories is that Texas-based church that bought up one point something million dollars worth of medical debt in their community for $15,000 and then held a death Jubilee ceremony where they invited people up to burn their debts.

So if I save my money, then use that money to buy property and build a profitable farm or a workshop or something else, isn’t that “using wealth to gain more wealth?” This guys’ moral premise is just retarded. The problem with usury is it is a shortcut to the acquisition of wealth that seems useful, but ultimately leads to far more negative effects down the road. It is based on exponential growth, which is inherently unsustainable whether it’s nature or economics. The excess money needed to feed the system of usury necessarily helps drive inflation. It does this in two ways, one being it puts pressure on increasing the money supply to allow the servicing of ever higher and higher debt. The second being how it bids up the price of goods and property by artificially increasing demand for things. Just look at how the low interest rates drove up the cost of housing and automobiles. The same is true with student loans, with universities being able to keep jacking up the price of tuition, knowing that students would just borrow more money. Without usury you would not have nearly the amount of asset and commodity inflation you are seeing right now. It hurts everyone, even people who do their best to avoid taking on debt, because inflation affects us all.

@Godcast (GOWAD half) > But *I* didn't have to take a loan. So you benefited from someone else taking out a loan then handing you the money. When every dollar is loaned into existence, there is no other way.

@Godcast (GOWAD half) I don't buy this moral reasoning, because it relies too much on the second paragraph - this suggests that someone who acquires such wealth is automatically bad, even if they got it through genuine means. This is a little disagreeable to most, but I'd more readily argue that usury is bad for the same reasons dealing drugs is bad - you're selling a product that harms the person you're selling it to, you do so knowingly, and you profit from it.