| Subject: | [socialcredit] Definition of usury. | | Date: | Tuesday, June 24, 2008 17:15:42 (-0600) | | From: | Martin Hattersley <jmartinh @....ca>
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I have been interested by the discussion on what is usury that has been
taking place.
R.H.Tawney, in his classic "Relligion and the Rise of Capitalism", after
discussing and dismissing various types of dealing which involve risk, and
so are not usurious, gives a definition as follows:
"What remained to the end unlawful was that which appears in modern
economics textbooks as 'pure interest' - interest as a fixed payment
stipulated in advance for a loan of money or wares without risk to the
lender.... The essence or usury was that it was certain, and that whether
the borrower gained or lost, the usurer took his poind of flesh."
(Transaction Publishers edition, 1998, p.42)
Summarizing the present relationship between the Capitalist and the
Christian approaches to life, where the former has effectively excluded the
area of commerce from the control of morality, he concludes: (ibid, p.286)
"the quality in modern society which is most sharply opposed to the teaching
ascribed to the founder of the Christian faith ... consists in the
assumption, accepted by most reformers with hardly less naivete than by the
defenders of the established order, that the attainment of material riches
is the supreme object of human endeavour and the final criterion of human
success...What is certain is that it is the negation of any system of
thought or morals which can, except by a metaphor, be described as
Christian. Compromise is as impossible between the church of Christ and the
idolatry of Wealth, which is the practical religion of Capitalist societies,
as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire."
In his "Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt", Nobelist Frederick Soddy sets out
the psychology of this approach in the following words: (page 122)
"Psychologically, the economic aim of the individual is, always has been,
and probably always will be, to secure a permanent revenue independent of
further effort, proof against the passage of time and the chance of
circumstance, to support himself in old age and his family after him in
perpetuity. He endeavours to do so by accumulating so much property in the
heyday of his youth that he and his heirs may live on the interest on it in
perpetuity afterwards. Economic and social history is the conflict of this
human aspiration with the laws of physics, which make such a perpetuum
mobile impossible, and reduces the problem merely to the method by which one
individual may get another individual or the community into his debt and
prevent repayment, so that the individual or community must share the
produce of their efforts with their creditor."
Something that concerns me about Douglas is the fact that he appears to wish
to superimpose his Social Credit remedies on a banking system not
fundamentally changed from the present. As I see it, the toleration of
interest (reward without risk), is in fact a means by which those who issue
credit become more and more wealthy at the expenses of the public, the value
of whose money is steadily eroded by inflation. It's certainly happening at
the present time, when the system at least in the United States appears to
have been pushed to the limits, and all signs are pointing at the moment to
a very unpleasant period of "Stagflation". Maybe this is why Muslims, who do
not allow this type of banking, are so unpopular in the Capitalist world.
Comments, anyone?
Martin Hattersley, 5929-189 St.,
EDMONTON AB CANADA T6M 2J1
Phone (780) 483-5442
e-mail <jmartinh@shaw.ca>
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Definition of usur
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