Charging rent on capital was historically called “usury”, and was denounced by everyone from Aristotle to Aquinas, from Moses to Buddha to Muhammad. I suspect they had the right of it, which poses some problems for our present society, fractally composed of usury (as the article aptly outlines).
I am not familiar with every theory behind every condemnation of usury (there are a multitude) but this is not true for any of the theories that I do know.
In fact it rather sounds like an intentionally foolish theory invented by someone practicing usury as the only possible reason anyone could disagree with them, and then incorrectly attributed to any opposition to their practice. You can sort of tell this is the case, because if you reverse the theory you get “usury creates wealth while other activities just shuffle it around”, which is a very flattering thing for an usurer to believe.
No, the theory was based on the idea that money is sterile: it does not in and of itself produce anything, whereas the economy is productive. They were generally not sophisticated enough to understand the exponential curve of compound interest which is obviously incompatible with a finite economy, but long experience showed them that usury lead to wealth concentration and eventual collapse.
Unfortunately today usury is so endemic that people can't see any other way of living, even though debt-free publically issued money is an obvious possible solution to many issues we face today. See social credit (canadian, not chinese)
fwlr · · focus · HN ↗
Plasmoid · · focus · HN ↗
fwlr · · focus · HN ↗
In fact it rather sounds like an intentionally foolish theory invented by someone practicing usury as the only possible reason anyone could disagree with them, and then incorrectly attributed to any opposition to their practice. You can sort of tell this is the case, because if you reverse the theory you get “usury creates wealth while other activities just shuffle it around”, which is a very flattering thing for an usurer to believe.
recursivedoubts · · focus · HN ↗
Unfortunately today usury is so endemic that people can't see any other way of living, even though debt-free publically issued money is an obvious possible solution to many issues we face today. See social credit (canadian, not chinese)
josefritzishere · · focus · HN ↗
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