Reader Apex came out with a comment about usury
on this post:
The Right should join forces with the left on this one point - that it's the money game by the bankers causing the problem. The debt held by banks is far higher than entitlements. Usury is a sin.
An interesting thought. Unfortunately, as I'm going to show, expecting anything of the government - right or left - is an exercise in futility. It's a smokescreen. It's a form of confusing/confused doublethink that the government and all indulge in.
Because government is also in on the scam that is usury, in a shitload bigger way than the banks.
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To start, we need to understand: without the modern credit/debt cycle, without a large number of people constantly slaving away to pay their monetary master's, our entire financial system will collapse (causing an instant recession/depression, chaos, etc). Which is why by-God the government and Fed bailed out the banks in 2008-2009, after allowing a token couple to bite the dust.
So. All these idiot people working madly to keep paying off $25+k of credit card debt are the modern equivalent of slaves. The best part from the slaveowner's point of view is that the slaves think they are free and so they do their absolute best to keep ahead of things.
Hell, they are free even to go and get pissed and fuck random people - burn their lungs out with carcinogens - buy shit that they don't actually need to live - travel the country and world to see things (I'm down with this one in a big way) - and will voluntarily work their asses off for all of these privileges plus more. In a way you have to admire the warped thinking and logic behind it.
The modern slaveowners love this. They only have to tell people simple lies like "you can have it all" and dangle the image of the carrot in front of them - especially teh wimminz. Teh wimminz then apply the pressure to their husbands. The slaveowners no longer have to:
1/ feed and house their slaves
2/ hire guards and the like to watch over and whip their slaves into doing actual work
3/ put up with shoddy workmanship (or sabotage) by someone who doesn't give a flying shit
Slavery has not gone away. Now it's changed, gotten a pleasanter and kinder and blander face on it, to involve the swapping of tokens of putative value (money) for voluntary effort put in. There is not a huge difference between the modern slave to their credit card/house mortgage and the old slave from the song Sixteen Tons:
Sixteen tons, whaddaya get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Hey Saint Peter don't you give me no call
I owe my soul to the Company store
Effectively I am a slave to my bank, via the "venerable institution" of owning a mortgage. Most men do this in service to teh wimminz and teh fambly, maintaining them at a socially-accepted-and-enforced minimum state of luxury - preferably more.
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It's interesting, digging into the origin of words. Going through the chain:
Latin: mortuus - dead - to Old French: mort
Old French: gage - pledge
Old French: mortgage - dead pledge
Which eventually ended up in English. You could literally say that it is a pledge that must be paid even after my death. Which is why I am forced to have insurance, just in case I'm hit by a bus or end up catching some terminal disease or develop cancer before finishing paying these assholes back.
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One problem with usury is that it's designed to restrict the amount of money available. This results in artificial shortage for the worker, as it forces him to hand over more money than the value of the item he's bought (credit card or mortgage). People will do damn near anything rather than starve to death.
The thing is that historically, shortages of money leads to less spending which leads to things like recessions and depressions. So what do they (the slaveowners) do about this? Generally they create more money, hopefully at a rate just slightly faster than the shortage of money would become noticeable. AKA inflation.
Go back to using gold and silver as money? Or something else that is fixed and not easily expandable?
You have a problem: economic output and new workers. People build stuff. So they go and build a few thousand more houses, or other public works, and they still need to be paid, plus they've got kids who when they grow up will start working and need to get paid. Where does the circulating money for the doubled or tripled population come from?
Generally you can't just open another silver mine to dig the stuff up and turn it into coins - apart from the fact that it requires more money to pay the workers, there just isn't that much silver around. That was the whole basis of turning it into your money supply. If it was that easy to get people would go and dig it up themselves, just like they did with the gold and silver rushes of the past. (The people who really made money were those selling supplies.)
So you end up doing what Nero did in the times of the Roman Empire: you debase the currency. Suddenly coins that started out as 100% silver went down to 85% silver. There was more physical coinage in circulation, it was just worth less value-wise (and you couldn't really tell). Other emperors did the same. Eventually, after about 200 years, the silver denarii had about 1% silver (sometimes nothing) and wheat that originally cost 1 denarius a bushel cost 200+ denarii a bushel.
Which is what we're seeing right now, with our stealth-inflation of something over 5% each year in our crappy fiat currencies. From the slave-owner's point of view, it's easier and sneakier to digitally multiply everything by 10 because you don't actually see any changes on the street - not like you're suddenly handing over two or three fistfuls of coins for a loaf of bread when you only used to hand over a couple of coins. It's also a helluva lot easier than dividing the silver content of a coin by 10, going from .900/90% (the old USA silver) to .090/9% overnight. Which is basically what happened twice in the USA:
1/ The United States Gold Reserve Act (1934) forced everyone to hand over all their gold and gold certificates to the Treasury, for $20-odd per troy ounce. Then they made gold worth $35 per troy ounce, effectively causing a shitload of inflation in an attempt to increase the money supply. The process also put everyone onto an overt silver standard instead instead of the gold standard (including silver certificates).
2/ In 1964 the USA stopped issuing silver coins (.900) and went to issuing cupro-nickel, I suppose because it was cheaper and easier to find and allowed them to make a heap more money for day-to-day circulation. It also allowed the USA to print paper bills much easier, effectively doing whatever the fuck they wanted with their money.
So of course the USA did this, despite the boast that any and all foreign holders of $US could be converted to gold at the rate of $35 per troy ounce. Yippee skip, until the French announced officially in 1965 that they would be exchanging their $US for gold at the official rate. In 1966 it came out that the USA held $13.2 billion worth of gold, their in-country monetary supply was $10 billion, which left a puny $3.2 billion worth of gold to cover foreign holdings of $14 billion printed US-dollars. Much happiness all around for those foreigners holding the dollars. You see, it only cost the USA a few cents per to engrave a plate and print a pallet-load of $US100 bills, but the foreigners had to pony up $100 of actual goods or gold to get the said $100 bill.
Then in 1971 Richard Nixon said "we no longer allow people to convert US$ to gold", dropping the gold standard - and eventually letting inflation run riot through the 1970's because there was less than nothing stopping these morons from printing a shitload of $100 bills costing $0.01 per. (This is just a simplistic explanation - google for The Great Inflation and suchlike if you want more detail etc.)
All this through the centuries was the origin of the term "bad money drives out good money" - it had the effect of driving good money out of circulation, because hey that one is 90% silver instead of a crappy 40% silver or shitty cupro-nickel. Stick it aside for a rainy day or for the kids. For a long time after the death of the silver standard in 1964, when the USA stopped circulating silver coins, people were finding the occasional silver coin in their change and hoarding it away.
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What's the solution? Damifino.
Thing is, no matter what you do, there are some men who are going to be industrious and gather together more than others (more than their "fair share" in leftist-socialist terms, which means "give it to me you hard-working slave"). And there are a lot of people who are going to piss everything away, and get into debt, and fuck their lives over for whatever reason (not even counting sheer bad luck happening). There are builders of fortunes and wasters of fortunes, the ants and the grasshoppers, and the grasshoppers want a free-ride on the ants.
A good number of women are in the waster/grasshopper category, especially these days. This is simply because they've never learned discipline. They've not been forced to, and they're not going to be forced to while the government instead forcibly taxes (steals from) those who build and gives a helluva chunk of it to those who waste. Especially teh wimminz who have done the wondrous thing of popping out a few fuckin' womb-turds from guys she doesn't even remember (like *giving birth* is something spe-shul that has never happened in the million-year history of the human race) so she holds out her hand all piteous-like for fuckin' help.
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Usury is a sin? A transgression of divine law?
Definitely.
It is a theft from your fellow-man. Commandment #8: Thou shalt not steal.
Just like the slavery of old times, when the stealing was the direct theft of a man's personal time and effort, forcing him to work - and if he didn't like it, hang or crucify or whip him to death as an example (Commandment #6: Thou shalt not murder). Then put another slave in his place, fuckit, there's plenty more where he came from.
These days the slavery is more stealthy, more benign, more relaxed. We submit to it voluntarily, unthinkingly, through usury and taxation, both thefts of our personal time and effort.
Business also spends a great deal of time forcing us to do make-work, 8+ hours a day, plus travel times to and from work. These are also designed to drain our energy and time. At the end of it we are happy if we can relax at the end of the day with a drink and our feet up, so drained from jumping through hoops of business' design that we have very little energy and time for ourselves. (Then we go looking for a wimminz to fuck and jump through *her* hoops as well in an effort to prove ourselves worthy of teh gold-lined pussy - la de fricken dah, we sure as shit spend a lotta time jumping through *somebody's* time-and-effort-wasting hoops.)
If we're married, we're forced keep teh wimminz happy for the rest of the day before sleeping, and our weekend goes to maintaining the house and grounds while she claims to be "utterly drained" by the "enormous effort" of looking after the children, cooking for 1-2 hours a day, washing clothing for 1-2 hours a week, and vacuuming and otherwise cleaning for 1-2 hours a week.
So 1/3rd of our time goes to sleeping (if we're lucky), 1/3rd of our time goes to working for a business that will dump our ass if we fuck up or they just want to reduce staff for whatever reason, and the remaining 1/3rd goes towards making teh wimmin's haaaaappppy by keeping the luxury-level of the house and grounds and cars and boat and what-the-fuck-else up to scratch or better - we're lucky if we get to have what is supposed to be "quality time" with the kids. (And then she divorces you out of the blue because yadda yadda yadda ad-fucking-nauseum...)
Of the two overt forms of usury (the business and wimminz being covert) I think that taxation is the worst form of theft. For example: We are taxed to build roads, we are taxed to use those roads (extra taxes on fuel, licenses, tolls, etc), and we are taxed if we do something that is deemed stupid upon those roads (speeding, driving erratically, drunkenness, etc - though in this case it is to discourage dangerous behaviour which can kill the driver and others using the roads).
If *all* that taxation went into providing useful infrastructure, I would not gripe so much about it. When a large amount goes to teh wimminz though...
...insert your own long list of the utterly-valueless wimminz crapola and shithole behaviour that we all know and loathe these days...
