Usury, or money-lending, has gone from being a despised, and often prohibited practice, to being one of the most respectable ‘professions’ of the modern world. Banks and bankers are generally the pillars of society — in my view, less ‘pillars of wisdom’ and more pillars of idiocy, misconduct, misery and corruption. How has it happened that our moral landscape has so changed that what was once considered the basest of practices has come to be so entirely acceptable, even admirable?
In fact, our society is run by usury and usurers. Usury is the ‘heart’ of capitalism, where usury is defined as charging interest on a loan, and where the loan can be of money, property, services or anything else that can be loaned.
In every small town, along with doctors, lawyers, vets, ministers etc bank managers are among the most respected and trusted members of the community.
My way into trying to work out what is wrong with money-lending is to make it a personal issue. In my experience, does money-lending enhance life? Does it create happiness? Is it maybe neutral? Or does it create misery?
Personally I hate to be in debt, and I hate having anyone in debt to me. On the basis that I hate to be in debt I assume that other people do not like to be in debt — well, OF COURSE no-one actually LIKES to be in debt, but sometimes people choose debt because the alternative seems worse.
I always avoided, as much as possible, getting into debt. I’d rather live within my means, no matter how restricted, than borrow money. However, the BIG exception was getting a mortgage. What a BURDEN that was! I felt trapped and insecure. For the next 25 years I was going to have to find the wherewithal to pay off that debt. No matter how my circumstances changed that debt would have to be paid. In fact, it might well mean that I had to arrange my life around the mortgage! It forces me to take the need to pay off the bank into consideration, prioritize it even, whenever I make life choices, say, changing my job. That is wrong. No usurer should be controlling the course of my life.
The horrors of a mortgage are legion: I could lose my house by various means but remain saddled with the debt. Or, a lesser version, the value of my house might drop so that either I am trapped because I cannot afford to move, or I sell my house but cannot clear the full mortgage and so am left paying off a debt for something I no longer possess.
Even if I have no problem with mortgage payments, the house is not actually mine, not really. I can do what I want with it only up to a point, mostly I can decorate as I choose, but for any major changes I have to get the permission of the bank. To me the point of owning my own home is that I can do what I want with it (housing regulations permitting ……!), and security, but actually a mortgage robs me of both of those.
For many years I remained in rented accommodation because home-ownership just seemed so restrictive and burdensome. Even the process of buying and selling a house is a long drawn-out and tricky business ……which just puts another ball-and-chain around one’s ankle.
And why are house prices so high? Because of usury. Usurers want the prices of things to be beyond the means of most people so that they are forced to borrow money. Usurers go out of business when prices are sane.
What an absurd, corrupt world: prices are absurdly high in order to support usurers. Usurers lend money and charge interest to make a profit. Then they buy and sell their profits to make a profit from their profits …… what kind of insanity is this? They are living a fantasy and have persuaded the rest of the world to accommodate them. They create nothing and give nothing to society except misery. They have invented a sort of parasitism that allows them to do nothing (yes, I know they call it ‘work’, call it ‘wealth creation’, etc but that is just part of the trick that allows them to get away with it) and yet acquire far, far more than their fair share of the goodies.
Let’s go back to the issue of housing. I have described my views and experience of mortgages. But what about renting?
When renting accommodation one is ‘borrowing’ property from someone else and paying for it. This is also usury. Lending anything and demanding payment WITH INTEREST (the landlord demands enough to cover his costs plus make a profit = usury.) is usury, so I cannot escape usury by renting.
My current next-door neighbours relocated temporarily, and for the 2 or 3 years of absence they rented out their house. It was rented by several different families, with and without children. In spite of careful selection procedures my neighbours still had a lot of neglect and damage to put right when they returned. This points to the effects of having to ‘borrow’, in this case, property.
Landlords are notoriously plagued by ‘careless’ tenants. But as a tenant you are living in a property that is not your own and from which you could be evicted at, virtually, the drop of a hat. On top of that, the landlord is making a profit out of your need for housing. I mean, who, under such circumstances, is going to CARE enough about the property they are borrowing to look after it properly? The best any landlord could hope for is that his tenants will feel it their moral duty to keep the place in good order — but one can die from a surfeit of ‘moral duties’!
I would like to go on now and look at taxes because the whole tax system is actually usury; I can sense that, but to tease things out so as to make the situation clear, to shine a light into the tangled and murky depth of the tax system, and the workings of our society, is difficult.
Anyway: first I pay taxes to my local council, council tax it’s called in my neck of the woods. The council ‘lends’ me their services — to organise local transport, schools, libraries, rubbish collection, council housing etc — and I have to pay them, pay the cost plus profit. Ie they charge me for the service plus interest, or profit. But where are the profits? Surely local councils are non-profit making? No. That is just another con, like this one: at Christmas my local council hands out extra refuse disposal bags. These, we are told, are ‘free’. Rubbish. We have paid for them through our taxes.
The local council is just like a business except that, besides the profits made by the managers and directors of the business they do not also have profits going to share-holders. In other words, the only difference is that there is only one level of profit making rather than two. So the profits made by local councils go into the pockets and bank accounts of the local councillors. The councillors would argue that they get paid what they are worth. Tosh. They profit very handsomely from lending their services.
The justification for their salaries, as for all salaries, is ‘supply and demand’. Well, yes, but the reason that capitalism works by supply and demand is that it is a system that can be controlled and manipulated by the usurers to their own benefit.
The obvious example is that of oil suppliers who regularly band together to control the flow of oil in order to drive up prices. Then there is the ridiculous price of houses where the usurers use the fact that everybody needs a home to drive up the price of housing. The price of necessities can be driven sky high by the system of supply and demand — which is why governments have to regulate the prices of basic foodstuffs etc.
It is argued that competition between suppliers keeps prices fair and quality reasonable. \What rubbish!! NOTHING IS EVER FAIR WHEN COMPETITION IS THE MOTIVATION. Or, put it this way: competition is ‘war’, and, as the saying goes, ‘all is fair in love and war.’ In any case, who in this day and age has the faintest idea what is a ‘fair’ price for anything? How do you know what is a ‘fair’ price for a loaf of bread? Or a tube of toothepaste, or a car? You do not. You have not the faintest idea. No-one knows what a ‘fair’ price is for anything, not even those who are selling things or services. The sellers do not know because they do not care and so do not think about it. All they think about is how to maximise profits.
I saw a programme on TV not so long ago, about some millionaires going out to Africa to give some of their money and expertise to improve life for poor Africans. One man persuaded (and he had to work hard at that) some villagers to build a potato store so that they could store their seasonal produce and make a better profit by selling it out of season. This is just the start. In a society where people mostly grow their own food and largely look after themselves, they can just choose to not buy expensive, out-of-season produce. Well then, the next move is to find ways of forcing the people to stop growing their own food and to grow cash-crops instead. Then whoever controls the supply of food can set whatever price they please.
In fact, the whole system works by making people ever more dependent in ever more ways on CASH. When people can no longer look after themselves, no longer feed themselves, cloth themselves, build their own houses, then the suppliers can set whatever damn price they please. They can charge really high prices so that only a few people can afford food and the rest starve, or they can choose to go for selling larger quantities of food at lower prices, and maybe people no longer starve, but maybe the price of food is still so high that the poor folk have to deny themselves other things, which then get called ‘luxuries’. It’s all a game of maximising profits, and there are numerous strategies you can choose from. The one thing you can be sure of is that none of them is of any advantage to anyone, or is ‘fair’ to anyone but the supplier. Supply and demand keeps prices fair and quality reasonable? What a myth that is.
The very idea of a ‘fair’ price is a bit nonsensical. What do you mean by ‘fair’? By what standard do you judge ‘fair’? Value is a different thing altogether. It is an individual thing. What is of value to one person may mean nothing to another. ‘Price’ is what happens to ‘value’ when usurers take control. And when ‘price’ takes over from ‘value’ the heart goes out of the world.
The world of usury is a heartless world in every way. Is it possible, I wonder, to sink any lower?
Usury makes me unhappy. It degrades my life.
Suppose, though, that I was wealthy, was making a handsome profit from business, or even banking. Would I be happy, in other words, if I was one of the big winners in our competitive society?
In my own small way I have sometimes been the lender. We all have. When a friend or family member has asked to borrow something from me, I always feel more comfortable if I can gift rather than lend, let alone ask for some sort of recompense, ie profit. I have written off money loans which have been quite sizable for me at the time. Why? Do you notice how relieved a person is when you write off a loan? Or how happy when you gift them something, whether it be your time, expertise or whatever? That is why: because it makes people happy.
Usury makes people sad; gifts make people happy. It’s that simple, and yet it is not, it appears, well understood………….
……………when I was very young I observed how my parents interacted. Father often behaved like a bully. He ruled the house, and mother, with a heavy hand. I puzzled and puzzled and puzzled over his behaviour. It was very clear to me that he was ruining his own life, so I could not understand why he behaved as he did. The point is that when people around you are happy they are full of life, energetic, imaginative, want to go places and do things, are up for fun etc. when the people around you are miserable they become dull, lifeless, wet-blankets that only want to mope around, a real drag. So make people around you miserable and you degrade your own life. Father obviously did not know this. People in general, I have since learned, do not. People are happily unaware that YOU CANNOT BEHAVE BADLY WITHOUT BRINGING SUFFERING DOWN UPON YOURSELF.
There are other ways in which bad behaviour makes the perpetrator suffer, but I won’t go into that here.
But to go back to usurers: they are ‘fouling their own nests’. The usurer is creating unhappiness in those around him, in his community, and that will just degrade the quality of his own life. So usury is bad news for the usurer as well as for those who are ‘used’.
A world where people are entirely cooperative and help each other is a world where people are happy. A world where people ‘use’ each other is a world where people, user and used alike, are sad.
We live in a very sad world.