A History of Interest Rates by Sidney Homer, Rutgers University Press, 1963
Credit is sometimes considered a modern device or
even a modern vice. A glance through the pages of financial history will dispel
the notion of novelty. Credit was in general use in ancient and medieval times.
Credit long antedated industry, banking and even coinage; it probably antedated
primitive forms of money.
For example, about 1800 B.C., Hammurabi, a king of
the first dynasty of ancient Babylonia, gave his people their earliest formal
code of laws. A number of chief provisions of this code regulated the relation
of debtor to creditor. The maximum rate of interest was set at 33 1/3% per
annum for loans of grain.
Twelve hundred years later, around 600 B.C., the
legal history of classical Greece began with the laws of Solon. Drastic reforms
were then called for by an economic crisis in Athens stemming in part from
excessive debt and widespread personal slavery for debt.
The Romans also began their legal history with a
body of laws regulating credit. This, too, was forced by a crisis characterized
by excessive debt.
These three examples from the earliest days of
historic Babylon, Greece and Rome are enough to support the conclusion that
credit at interest was widespread enough to create major political problems.
Usury,
or interest, was fundamental to the economics of these great civilizations,
driving its unsustainable growth and eventual collapse. Modern civilization has
the same trappings of past fates.
The Dance of Death by Chris Hedges
13
Mar 2017
The graveyard of world empires—Sumerian, Egyptian,
Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian—followed the same
trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Civilizations in decline, despite
the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their
“greatness.” Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that
gave rise to civilization are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their
leaders are trained only to serve the system. And when the last moments of a
civilization arrive, the degenerate edifices of power appear to crumble
overnight.
Those who rule at the end of empire are
psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the
depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus. The ecosystem
that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth,
concentrated in the hands of elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage
imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests,
courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and
corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society. Capitalism ruthlessly commodifies
human beings and the natural world to extract profit until exhaustion or
collapse. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only
to instill technical proficiency to serve the engine of capitalism. Historical
amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded
as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or
locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminant and brutal.
The elites’ myopic response to the looming collapse
of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations
work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids,
palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. Increasing military spending and
taking the needed funds out of domestic programs typifies the behavior of
terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to
sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on
state resources.
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