38 Comments

I wonder about how well your statement "For most of history money lending existed on social margins," captures the historical reality, given how discussions of lending, usury and such crop up all through human literature. I suspect that instead lending has been very common throughout human history, circumscribed a bit by how risky it was to lend money to those who could up and disappear with it fairly easily. Otherwise it seems odd that e.g. Aristotle would spend any time talking about it, after all if it is strange and fringe, something only the lower classes engage in, why bother focusing on it?

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I have a friend of the moneylender persuasion. He told me we'd still be living in sod houses on the prairie if it weren't for debt. Great article. Super important. Thanks.

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And what religion would that be? Not Islam; they have plenty of ways to get around the prohibition of usury.

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> It’s difficult to imagine a world without lending at interest, and there are many who will tell you that no modern civilization can exist without a modern banking system.

Those people are correct.

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I agree wholeheartedly, for usury is the sin which enslaves as mortals to the damnation of greed. Usury will only bring despair upon the masses. I have also have written about the ruin of usury in my series "Uligarchy: When Usury and Oligarchy Meet".

https://samaratheharbinger.substack.com/p/the-uligarchy-when-usury-and-oligarchy

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