eyeno wrote: Usury is a problem but the bigger problem is the creation of money by private parties. When a society does not have control over the creation of its money most of society suffers and that is actually a bigger problem than usury.
For once we're in agreement on something.
Yes, the creation of money by private parties is just insane. Nobody should be given that power. It WILL be abused. Hell, I wish I had a way to make money out of thin air right now, I'd sure as hell take advantage of it. I'd throw a pretty damn good party.
How else would things get financed, if not for the borrowing of money? Seriously. If you needed money to start a business, what are you supposed to do, save up your entire life, until you're 80 years old, to maybe get the money to start it?
Well, that is sort of the point isn't it? If it were not for usury people could save the fruits of their labor and retire long before they were 80 and have all they needed to live comfortably. We don't live in the stone age. We have machines that can do the work of hundreds of thousands of humans. Hundreds of millions of people could sit on their ass, never contribute to society, and society as a whole would still have all it needed to live very comfortably. We don't have a scarcity problem, we have a greed problem, and that is the crux of my point.
But .... we HAVE those machines because somebody borrowed a LOT of money to develop them, produce them, build the factories to make them, etc. etc.. etc.
I have friends who started successful businesses and never would have been able to do so unless they could take out loans to finance them. It really is what fuels the system. And there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself.
But when debt is used to create money then things start getting just plain weird and upside down and ass-backwards.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick