The Solutions to Usury

Thus begins the article:

I have been asked by a penetrating, literate mind what I think the solution to usury is, and what usury is. I will try to answer this.

Usury is a sin wherein money is rented out for necessities. This requires further definition, of course, and I don’t intend to say the final word on the subject here. It is better to examine its effects rather than its source in order to understand it.

Money is an object that has value in exchange. Normally, historically, this is based off of real tangible value, such as a metal’s use when formed into shapes. However, the quantity of its value is linked to its availability and its rarity, and it has been told to me recently that all money operates on a fiat basis, since even metal is exchanged based off the mutual belief of its value, which is not inherent in its usage physically (considering also that coins are rarely actually used for forming other objects).

The process of loaning and of debt is different than usury, just as the marital act is different from fornication or prostitution. If money is promised at a future time and this is recorded, then that is a loan. It is promised to the loaner, who accepts the promise. Debt, then, is the obligation which the person has to fulfill the loan. Because this is based on non-tangible things, on time, on prediction of the future, it is very easy to see how this can be abused.

Interest is a quantifiable percentage increased upon the original loaned amount over some period of time or fixed at a certain amount. It can be based off of a number of things, such as the profit of the endeavor for which the money is used, or on the opportunity which the loaner has lost in giving up his money or his other goods, or some other cost of loaning the money.

Usury is the abuse of this. It comes when a man makes undue profit off of a loan. This profit is undue when the loan is extorted or used for a necessity, such as housing and food. Because loaning in general has a negative effect on economics, wherein the more loaning occurs the more everything increases in cost, it should be discouraged in general. It is not a good thing. Usury, by adding a profit incentive to loans (and often by removing the risk of loans), encourages loaning in the same way fornication encourages unprovided children.

These are our definitions then. Let us proceed next to examining the effects which usury has had on our society and what solutions exist for destroying it

Effects of Usury

It is outside of the scope of this article to examine the history of usury. I have talked about it extensively elsewhere. For now, suffice it to say, that usury has been going on about 400 years, and is the reason Western Civilization has influenced all the rest of the world, being the tool which established the empires of the last two centuries.

Let’s skip over all the history which explains things and just look at the average person’s life. Most people work jobs. Why do they work jobs? To get paid. Why do they need to get paid? There’s a good question. When people reach adulthood, a lot of folks want to avoid the dismal 9-5, 25-65 fate which is laid out for them. They end up traveling, going to the streets, experiencing things, trying to follow simple dreams, and they find out that they have to pay for everything. They have to pay just to live, just to breathe, it feels like. For instance, food. When someone is hungry, they go to the grocery store to buy food and have to give money. I have had the experience of not having money at a grocery store, of asking for samples of the produce and then asking for the remainder of whatever fruit they cut into, of getting free cookies at the bakery section. This is pretty hard to live off. You can read in books about people living off the land, off of what they find on the side of the road, off of the soil outside their front door, and money is never usually required in order to eat. Work might be required, as it says in the Bible, but not money. But me, I was not taught how to do any of these things, and when I look around, I do not see fruit trees and overgrown greens and nuts all over the ground which I can live off of. There is still some of it there, but not much.

Now, let’s look at housing. Why do I need to buy a house? My father lived in a house. In fact, he lived in several at different times. He had to pay rent for most of his life. He owned a house before he was divorced. Why does he have to pay rent? Because the owner of the house which he rented had a mortgage, and he had to cover that mortgage. When I became an adult, I did not have a house to rely on, but I had to go and find my own house. Nor could I find anything near my father. Now that I have the skills to build a house, I cannot do it without first getting a mortgage, because I have to buy the land. So, my father lives hundreds of miles away from me and my children, and even though I have a farm with hundreds of pounds of meat walking around, I have to work a job in order to have money, and I go to the grocery store to buy food.

Housing and groceries are both industries that were not capitalized historically, except in small, limited situations. The reason why they are capitalized today, the reason why they are so expensive, and the reason why many other things are bought and sold is because when loans are taken out, and payments have to be met, then people have to come up with ways to make money, even if they have everything else they need. Especially if the consequence of not paying those loans means you lose your freedom, or your house, or your food, or other necessities which threaten your family. That is, if the force of law or some other force is behind debt collection, then men prioritize making payments above other things which normally would be considered more important, such as family, religion, society, neighborhood. These payments then go to the benefit of the people who necessarily already own property and wealth, because they have loaned these things out, rather than to somebody trying to reach stability.

Usury causes the disordering of the economy and multiplies the loans used. Normally, if a person needs money badly, they go to their loved ones for help. They seek a gift first. If that does not work, then they would try to borrow the money without interest. If that does not work, then they may take a loan. On the other side of things, people with money normally do not want to give it out for free or even loan it at risk, but would rather use it to build up more things for themselves. Therefore, they usually first build their own property and attempt to make it profitable, and they may then also build up their family, their friends, their neighbors, and finally strangers, in order to continue to maximize their own prudential self-interest. There is great variety in this, of course, across all society. But because loans are not very profitable investments, they are not pursued by most people with excess wealth. However, when they can be profitable, more people pursue them. When they can be made for necessary things, then the people who might otherwise continue begging in stranger and stranger places, instead take the usurious loans, and will pay them back with various degrees of success. When they are punished for not paying them back, then more people will pay them back, even if they have to neglect their neighbors or their duties or religion or something else. Without any moral calculation, without saying what people should or should not do, it is easy to see why the profit made from usury disorders an economy. It is often invested in means of adding force to debt collection, in order to increase profits.

Now, once usury has set in, and loans multiply, as said before, people have to invent ways of making money. Now someone with a vacant house is unlikely to let somebody stay in it for free, even their own child. Now someone with excess produce is unlikely to give it away for free. Now someone with excess time is unlikely to spend it devotionally or charitably. They instead have to utilize more of their resources for making money.

Hence, we have marketing. We are all being convinced to buy things endlessly. When we go to the gas station, garbage and poison is held under our eyes, enticing us to buy and consume it. And why are we at the gas station? Because we have to drive somewhere, and chances are it has to do with making money. Even if we are on vacation, it is to decompress from the stress of working a job. Even if we are retired, we are pursuing recreation or something else to make up for all the time spent trading time for money at a job. We are being made hungry because of intensive psychological designing of advertisements and billboards.

This just scratches the surface, and I have attempted to approach it from a common man’s perspective, but the real way to understand this problem is through history. Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it. That is why “traditionalists” pursue 1950s tradition. If they knew what made 1950s America possible, they would not pursue it, and they would understand what tradition really is. Usury made 1950s America possible, and a 9-5 job is not the Promised Land, but because a grocery store cashier in the 1950s made enough to own his own house, keep his wife home from work, and go on vacation once a year, everyone dreams wistfully of that way of life. There is a much better way of life that does not require establishing an empire over the whole world by usury, which is what America did in 1950.

Solutions to Usury

The problem with giving a solution is that usury complicates everything in the same way that sin complicates everything. The solutions are complex. Most people want a political, economic, or social “-ism” to rally behind, but even this is really for the most part an attempt at acquiring a shadow of a community when the real community was broken up into parts and sold repeatedly by usury. For simplicity, however, I will break up some generic solutions into a few different categories of “-ism”s with which I have been engaging lately.

There are an infinitude of categories to cross-cut everyone and everything. I am going to use a few religious categories, and I am going to focus on Americans. I pause the article here because it has been quite a slog up until this point because of my duties as a family man, and I might get some feedback before proceeding. It is possible I will not settle on the religious angle.

Atheism

I have been an atheist and believed that my enemy was the underlying belief in God which is inherent in every little aspect of language and society. I said to myself, this will be a long war, and I started pushing back anytime someone said “God bless you” for sneezing. I am not sure what I would have done if I learned that “Goodbye” is a derivative of “God be with you”. Quite likely, I would have been discouraged a little bit, and then continued trying to root it out.

It is good to understand that ideas are the enemy more than people, that what someone says or does is not always directed by conscious or active thought. The desire to release people from a sort of mental slavery by attacking the unquestioned habits of their life is a good one. You will find that those who practice religion are often doing so based merely on unexamined habit, and these deserve a sort of testing. However, I will say this, that the reason people rely overmuch on habit is because they have no time to think, and the reason they have no time to think, is because they are working too hard just to live. If they have a wife and children, doubly so. That is why there is an annoyance and an emotional resistance when someone tries to make them think. It is because they cannot afford to, while they are living paycheck to paycheck, as it were.

The main thing to understand about all religious people, even the lukewarm, is that they have a belief in a simple good and a complex bad. They think drinking is bad and sobreity is good, for instance. They think marijuana is bad. Neither are these things based off of arbitrary reasoning, but generally it is out of experience and observation. Oftentimes, they look at atheistic groups, even on the news, and observe many accidental features that they they associate with a lack of religion, and they avoid these things. And so religious people listen to the appearance of a person, the color of their hair, their piercings, their affinity for substances, their way of making a living, and they do not listen to reasoned arguments.

Therefore, if an atheist wants to be able to cooperate with the religious population, which is the majority, it behooves them to focus on changing the things which they might not like about themselves which would also align with what most people think is good or bad. This way they can be more targeted.

Morality is, on a material level, about stability and predictability. If you have a distinct moral code that is published, then everyone can know basically how you should act, and when you go against it, they can charge you with the crime to your conscience. This stability and predictability then, in turn, makes you more likely to succeed with other people around you, and more people will want to help and to cooperate with you.

The best thing for all the goals of atheists, who in my experience often have an excellent understanding of the evils of economics based on usury, being opposed to Capitalism, is to study integrity and character and incorporate anything they can find which is acceptable to them.

Islamism

Protestantism

Depth and prudence

Orthodoxism

Active life

Catholicism

Catholics have more wealth by and large than any other group. I have written on this and spoken on it extensively. Catholic religion promotes poverty and selflessness, but Catholics of today are extremely reticent to lose any of their goods. And this is largely because they do not have as many goods as they appear to have, by the operations of debt, and what they do have is hard fought.

When St. Dominic went to convert the Albigensians, he looked at what the other Catholic preachers were doing. He noticed that they were luxurious. What did that mean? They wore shoes, they had wagons, they had people with them. These things obviously would not be considered luxurious today. But the people to which he was preaching had no shoes, no servants, plain, rough clothes, and were poor and ascetic.

Catholics put far too much attention into their appearance. They clutch their pearls too much. Because the goods are not as secure or as prevalent as they might have been thirty years ago, it is very reasonable to be protective of them. But there is a way to be generous and fruitful. Much like a person can give a loan rather than giving gifts if they be limited, a man can start a business with their free time rather than doing volunteer work.

Business is not a dangerous and scary, risky endeavor. You do not need to take a loan to do it. You do not even have to get licensed, bonded, and insured. Business is an extremely simple thing which every other culture does naturally, and only we struggle with. You simply offer a good or service, and you collect money. It is difficult and frustrating, but it is ultimately freeing.

We are supposed to have more time and money than we have. The very little bit we have should be invested rather than given away, because the needs of our neighbors and our families are too great. St. Paul says those who do not provide for their relatives (distinguishing this from the members of their own household) are worse than unbelievers. That means that even if your children are grown and out of the house, you ought to still be capable of providing for them. It is a gross disorder that most people cannot.

Therefore, let us take the little bit of time and money we have and, rather than giving it all away through a multitude of devotions, apply it rather to corporal acts of mercy that can be monetized properly (such as instructing the ignorant). This is best done through business. If you examine the businesses which individuals are starting and successfully growing, they are often related to teaching skills and knowledge which people now by and large lack, such as basic construction, farming, budgeting, homekeeping, and the like. Many people have no idea how to do these things. This will grow time and money as well as community with very little risk and, furthermore, give many opportunities for generosity that do not have to be separated into compartments away from work life.

Here is an interview I did about usury.

If you would like to buy me a coffee, I would be happy to talk to you about how we can fix usury together for the glory of God and the growth of the Church.

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