What do you think is the biggest drag on our economy?
If you said “usury“, welcome to Club Classically Correct.
Usury is not, as so many would have you believe, the charging of an excessive rate of interest.
That is the modern definition. Banker approved.
The classical definition of usury is commonly attributed to Aristotle:
“There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest (tokos), which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of any modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.”
– Aristotle, c. 350BC (Politics, Book I, Part X)
Today, our modern “money” system is the pinnacle of the money-lenders’ art.
Or should I say rather, the money-lenders’ “artifice”:
ar·ti·fice
[ahr-tuh-fis]
noun
1. a clever trick or stratagem; a cunning, crafty device or expedient; wile.
2. trickery; guile; craftiness.
3. cunning; ingenuity; inventiveness: a drawing-room comedy crafted with artifice and elegance.
4. a skillful or artful contrivance or expedient.
The vast majority (around 97%) of “money” is simply electronic digits.
Digital bookkeeping entries.
Created by the banking system, every time a person signs up for a new (or bigger) loan.
(See The World’s Most Immoral Institution Tells You How + Think You’ve Got Cash In The Bank? Think Again)
And here is the key to the usurers’ immense power and wealth. They have been given the exclusive rights not just to create this digital “money” in the form of debt that must be repaid. You have to pay back those digital bookkeeping entries with interest.
It is interest – usury – that is the biggest drag on our economy.
Consider this.
According to the ABS, the average size loan for a first home buyer in Australia reached an all-time high $293,900 in December 2012. A typical variable home loan rate right now is 5.6% – that’s with the RBA’s official interest rate at record “emergency” lows, mind you. According to ASIC’s “MoneySmart” online calculator, taking out such a loan right now, and repaying $2,000 a month for the next 20 years and 9 months, would result in your repaying the bank $203,598 in usury alone.
Of course, this assumes that interest rates did not rise in the next 20-something years. If (when) they do, then so too does the amount of usury you must repay to the bank.
Just the other day I was wondering, “Has anyone ever bothered to calculate the total value of one year’s worth of usury repayments, on all home loans in the Australian economy”?
To be frank, I have neither the skills nor the knowledge to make an accurate calculation.
But it is not hard to work out a very rough approximation. Something that helps give some idea of just what a drag on the economy the repayment of usury on the banks’ digital bookkeeping entries must be.
According to the RBA, at December 2012 the Australian banking system claimed a total $1.136 Trillion in residential loan “Assets”.
(Yes, that’s right. Your signature on a loan document, pledging yourself to decades of debt slavery to repay the bank their digits, is considered the bank’s “Asset”)
According to Canstar’s variable rate home loan comparison chart, a variable mortgage rate of around 5.6% would appear fairly typical right now.
So, as a very basic approximation, if the total value of all the banks’ mortgage “assets” at end December 2012 were on the variable rate of usury, thus earning the banks 5.6% p.a., then (ignoring compounding, which makes the total even higher) the banks’ would stand to earn $63.6 billion in usury on home loans in 2013.
Just imagine all the far better, more productive and valuable uses that much “money” could be put to in 2013 by Aussie households.
Now again, I stress my lack of knowledge on this data. For all I know, the value of expected usury repayments may already be included in the RBA’s total of banks’ mortgage “assets”.
If so, it matters very little. Even a mere 5.6% compound interest on >$1 Trillion in mortgage debts, is a huge annual sum.
Clearly, the drag on the economy from the burden of repaying usury to the bankers on home loans alone, is truly staggering. EPIC.
And when we consider that banks have done nothing to deserve this exclusive right to profit from our lifetime labours, the truth of Aristotle’s observation is only the more clear.
Of any modes of getting wealth, usury is indeed the most unnatural.
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