Usury, Aquinas and Baphomet

Usury, taking interest on a loan, used to be considered a sin. Now it's the keystone virtue of our civilization. Here's some Aquinas, from somewhere in the Summa:

Article I.—Is it a sin to take usury for the lending of money?

R. To take usury for the lending of money is in itself unjust, because it is a case of selling what is non-existent; and that is manifestly the setting up of an inequality contrary to justice. In evidence of this we must observe that there are certain things, the use of which is the consumption of the thing; as we consume wine by using it to drink, and we consume wheat by using it for food. Hence in such things the use of the thing ought not to be reckoned apart from the thing itself; but whosoever has the use granted to him, has thereby granted to him the thing; and therefore in such things lending means the transference of ownership. If therefore any vendor wanted to make two separate sales, one of the wine and the other of the use of the wine, he would be selling the same thing twice over, or selling the non-existent: hence clearly he would be committing the sin of injustice. And in like manner he commits injustice, who lends wine or wheat, asking a double recompense to be given him, one a return of an equal commodity, another a price for the use of the commodity, which price of use is called usury. 

Our present economic and financial system is based on usury; every Dollar we grasp in our eager spending hands is issued by the Fed, at interest. The borrower (USGOV) must repay this debt by getting more money, which comes, ultimately, from selling more things.

But there's only so much you can sell in a finite world, and only so much that people want, or need, or are able to buy. Despite the marketeers, infinite usurious growth is unsustainable.

As a last ditch measure, the financial powers are leaning towards negative interest rates and a ban on cash, in a desperate bid to get people to spend more and fuel the debt engine. This will fail and end in a reset, which will not be pretty, to put it mildly.

With that in mind, why do you think local PDs are investing in MRAPS?

Message to market: Prepare for the worst, and be happily surprised if it doesn't come down, Baphomet-Style, on our iniquitous and devilish society. But perhaps it already is? You be the judge.

Your Pal,

LSP

That's the Spirit, Spirit of the Age!

that's the spirit

You know how it is, one minute you're humming along to Quark, Strangeness and Charm and the, er, lab-coated guitar genius that is "Baron" Brock, when all of a sudden a philosopher sends you a quote. A quote that gets right into the spirit of the age. Here it is, from Eric Voegelin's essay Immortality: Experience and Symbol.

And with the seventeenth century begins the incredible spectaculum of modernity—both fascinating and nauseating, grandiose and vulgar, exhilarating and depressing, tragic and grotesque--with its apocalyptic enthusiasm for building new worlds that will be old tomorrow, at the expense of old worlds that were new yesterday; with its destructive wars and revolutions spaced by temporary stabilizations on ever lower levels of spiritual and intellectual order through natural law, enlightened self-interest, a balance of powers, a balance of profits, the survival of the fittest, and the fear of atomic annihilation in a fit of fitness; with its ideological dogmas piled on top of the ecclesiastic and sectarian ones and its resistant skepticism that throws them all equally on the garbage heap of opinion; with its great systems built on untenable premises and its shrewd suspicions that the premises are indeed untenable and therefore must never be rationally discussed; with the result, in our time, of having unified mankind into a global madhouse bursting with stupendous vitality.

That was written in the 1960s and I think it's pretty much right on the money, especially in its madhouse aspect. But what about "stupendous vitality"? Some would say that's on the wane. Let's see what survives the not so slow moving train wreck of ponzi scheme economics.

Feet forward, heels down, ride on.

LSP