Bill Powell Is Alive [The Den]

Bill Powell Is Alive [The Den]
{ Three Acres and a Penguin }

Usury: The Dirty Word

begun: 2007 Jul 21, 18:57 Sat | updated: 2007 Jul 21 16:57 | tags: distributism

The original beginning to this post had nothing to do with usury, and has been moved to A Watery Hiatus. I explained that I had had to read Sartre because I was working on a movie screenplay…

I could talk about Sartre, but I’ve chosen a comparatively cheerful topic: usury. Here’s the “Brittanica Concise” definition:

In law, the crime of charging an unlawfully high rate of interest. In Old English law, the taking of any compensation whatsoever was termed usury. With the expansion of trade in the 13th cent., the demand for credit increased, necessitating a modification in the definition of the term. In 1545 England fixed a legal maximum interest, a practice later followed by other Western nations.

Usury is an ugly word, and something of an expletive. Judging from how often you hear the actual word, (usury!) it seems more obscene than any conventional curse. The pithy definition above is a rather decorous take on a revolution in economics. I wonder if they note elsewhere that with the expansion of trade, the demand for slave labor also increased, necessitating a modification of other terms as well. Don’t you love anonymous destiny verbs? Necessitate!

Perhaps you’ve heard about the Distributist (and Catholic) idea that the morality of interest on a loan has nothing to do with some arbitrary limit set by the state, but rather with the nature of the loan itself. In his Restoration of Property, Belloc argues while interest may be taken on a productive loan as a legitimate share in the profits, any interest taken on a non-productive loan is usury.

This is quite a statement. It used to be considered common sense, and even common law, but today this simple idea would bring down huge sectors of the economy like a mall of cards. Take the mortgage industry. For almost every house you drive past, someone is paying two or three times the (already insane) ticket price of the place. Where is that extra $100,000, $200,000, or $300,000 coming from over those twenty or thirty years? The house isn’t growing. It’s not sprouting bathrooms or expanding new cozy dens. It’s a dead structure. Yet the owner must pay and pay and pay, as if the house were magically turning into a palace month by month, and the mortgage company deserved a cut.

I eagerly await a papal condemnation of the mortgage industry, but though I’m not holding my breath, it is true that multiple twentieth-century Popes have explicitly condemned usurious loans to poor countries. Oddly enough, this scores a homiletic cameo even less often than the supposedly really unpopular items like abortion or contraception. Even social justice types can blather on all day about hunger without considering the concrete ways their country helps cause it.

Since the recriminalization of interest on non-productive loans (gloriously colorless phrase!) would mean the wholesale destruction of those pleasant little industries that feed on mortgages, credit cards, car loans, student loans, and war loans, I had thought myself on the radical end of this particular spectrum. I thought, restrict loan interest to a share in the actual profits a loan produces, and the world will be remade.

Then I read a recent Gutenberg book, Usury: A Scriptural, Ethical, and Economic View. The author, Calvin Elliott, has a simple thesis: any interest on any loan is usury. Theft. A crime. Period.

It’s not every day that someone makes Belloc look like a permissive capitalist.

The book was published by the Anti-Usury League of Millersburg, Ohio. I had never heard of them. I wonder how they’re doing. If you’re interested in this topic at all (too late, you’re reading this), you need to read this book. I recommend at least a good skim. Elliott seems to be a sturdy Protestant, and he’s writing in 1902, so the first blast of his argument is a barrage of Scripture quotes to which the average reader today might be all too immune. But press on, and you will find his later arguments thought-provoking indeed.

Money is dead. Get over it.

Usury rests on a fundamental assumption that money grows, that five dollars ought to turn into ten dollars after a few years, like an acorn bursting into a mighty oak. If money can’t grow, if it’s a thing, a tool, like a hammer, then we have a serious problem.

Suppose you leave a five-dollar bill on the table and come back in a month. Perhaps you expect to find that Mama Lincoln has a new brood of cute little baby penny Lincolns. But perhaps not. The bill, if you’re lucky, has just sat there, and it’s far more likely that it’s been lost or stolen or made into a mouse nest. Hmm. It didn’t grow.

Yet what is obviously ridiculous with money in the form of paper becomes mysteriously plausible when we etherialize money as investments or CDs or even a simple checking account. You put your money in the bank (or virtuous credit union), and of course it just grows. That’s what money does.

But how exactly does this work? Your money is now even more fragile. From a physical piece of paper, it’s become an arrangement of magnetized tape that has to be interpreted in a particular way by a particular machine running a particular program (and probably a particular version of that program), all of which have to be maintained and backed up and insured by humans just to keep your money from vanishing into the digital void. So far your money is a net loss; the five dollar bill could have been stashed in a drawer, but now your five dollars requires a hilarious amount of effort merely to remain in existence. On top of all this, you expect the bank to take on the hassle of managing it; if you write a check, the bank has to record the transaction. The bank has to make your five dollars accessible to a global network of ATM machines. The bank has to send you a piece of paper every month to remind you that you still have five dollars. And for all these services, you don’t pay the bank, the bank pays you.

Those poor banks. Pushovers.

Of course, that whopping 1.5% interest rate isn’t even keeping up with inflation, so in a sense you are paying them after all. And even if the rate was higher, if you could actually find a CD with a rate higher than inflation (do they make those?) we know that the bank suffers all these agonies precisely because it is sure it can loan your five dollars to some other chump who will have to repay it at a much higher rate of interest. So the question is: where does your interest come from? Where does the bank get that money to pay you extra? They don’t make any money. The chump does. And where does he get it? If he borrows the five dollars as venture capital for his lemonade stand, is he going to plant that bill in a glass and at last make it grow?

This is where it gets interesting. I’m belaboring this point because the idea of organic money seems to be one of the uglier superstitions of our time. We everyday people really walk around with this bizarre idea that money grows. Our savings account may be a slow-but-sure redwood, our credit card finance charges may be more on the order of poison ivy, but to try to stop either of them seems like trying to freeze a teenage male mid-growth spurt. By following around this five dollar bill, we’ve hopefully gotten at least as far as Belloc; money itself is dead, so only productive loans actually produce wealth. The bank didn’t take my five dollars and make more dollars. They just took care of it, made it available to me, and loaned it to the chump. It’s up to the chump to produce some wealth.

Belloc would say that if the chump uses the five dollars to buy lemons, honey, and an ad in the Wall Street Journal, and uses these tools to create more wealth (lemonade), then the bank has a right to a share in these profits. The chump couldn’t have done it without the five dollars, so the bank deserves a cut.

But why does the bank deserve a cut? The chump took the five dollars, and he did all the work.

Certainly the bank deserves to get back its five dollars (and, I would add, though no one seems to mention this, an additional fee to adjust exactly for inflation, so that the sum returned is worth precisely as much as the five dollars that was lent). But everything in addition to the five dollars plus inflation, all that profit—how exactly did the bank do any of that? It sure looks like the chump was the one out there squeezing lemons and haggling with customers. True, without the five dollars, the chump couldn’t have made the money. But without the chump, the bank would still be sitting on five dead dollars.

A Copernican Revolution: Wealth Decays

We’ve reached Elliott’s most fascinating argument: wealth decays. What does this mean? One articulate definition of wealth is: property that has economic utility. Those two elements are essential; wealth is not only property, but property that humans can use in an economic way. Our first example of usury was a house. A mortgage presumes that the house is in a continuous, glorious evolution into greater and greater usefulness, while in reality it is a dead arrangement of building materials. The mortgagee pays for value that isn’t there. But when we considered the tribulations that the valiant bank must undergo to keep your five dollars in existence, it became clear that wealth not only does not grow, it is not even static. It takes effort to keep your five dollars safe and accessible, to keep it worth five dollars, to maintain that wealth. And lo and behold, houses are not exactly static either.

What is home ownership, anyway, but an epic tale of collapsing furnaces, exploding pipes, and water heaters electrifying the laundry room faucet? If you abandon a house for five years, it will remain your property, but you will lose wealth. When you return, the house may have just as much wood and drywall and wiring as when you left, but in will be in a much less useful arrangement for humans (and far more useful for the rats and roaches who have subdivided it into developments).

Wealth decays. This is a Copernican Revolution (if I may join the club and rip the phrase off from Kant). We think of wealth as a dynamic of growth, whereas the reality is exactly the opposite; the world wars ceaselessly on our wealth, and wins. Even live wealth eludes us; cows have calves, but they attack their fences; fields left fallow sprout weeds, then shrubs. To keep property useful requires perpetual effort.

(Incidentally, this is the peculiar fascination of permaculture, which is the science of designing systems in which nature can function to produce wealth by its own rules and inner dynamics with a minimum of human intervention. The classic example, perhaps, is a food forest, where trees produce food year after year with hardly a human touch. But permaculture is obviously the exception rather than the rule in economic activity, and even a do-nothing master like Fukuoka will be the first to say that a great deal depends on that minimum of intervention.)

If wealth decays, it must be renewed even to remain what it was. As Chesterton said in another context, if you want the old white post, you must have a new white post; the old white post was brilliant, but after a few years, it needs a new coat of paint. This renewal takes work, and is thus the creation of more wealth. And who does this work? The lender? Suddenly we see that the entire burden has fallen on the borrower. The chump has to work just to keep that five dollars intact and return it. Even if he works very hard and turns a further profit, what right does the bank have to a cut when it has already profited by receiving back the original sum intact?

Elliott quotes Ruskin:

You can not have your cake and eat it. If you do not eat it, you have your cake, but not a cake and a half. Not a cake and a quarter tomorrow, dunce, however abstinent you may be, only the cake you have, if the mice do not eat it in the night.

We’re taught to assume that the bank needs to be compensated because it could have just sat on the five dollars itself. But if wealth decays, this is false; if the bank had sat on the five dollars, it would now be less than five dollars. In exchange for his use, the chump maintained the sum. In a world soaked in usury, inflation makes this point undeniable; that five dollar bill in your wallet is literally losing value as you read.

I’m not sure that all this is a conclusive proof that interest on a business loan is usury, and the idea of overturning the entire economy certainly raises a few practical questions, but I think we’ve seen enough to call the matter into grave question. And I’d like to close by noting that if all such interest is usury, than the most terrifying revelation to come is not the enormity of our economic corruption, but the cancer that we carry in our souls.

The Virtue of Theft

What’s the point of an investment? I want to take my money that would otherwise be dead and put it to work for me. But what if there’s a slight error there, one word, one little pronoun? What if I want to put them to work for me?

What if our desire to be smart, sensible, good stewards, to lay up for retirement and our children’s future, is precisely the same impulse as that of the benevolent plantation master? What if my very concept of flourishing as a solvent adult is inextricably bound up with systematic robbery?

That makes me sick.

It makes me sick because I know it’s true. I know that it is not enough for me to work with my hands and get paid for my day’s work, I know there’s an underlying dynamic whereby I feel that I should get more, that to earn in an hour only what I myself made in that hour is to fail. We can muddy the issue immeasurably by claiming that we’ll stick to moral investments, but once we grasp the concept of investment, of something for nothing, of wealth ex nihilo, we have tasted the cocaine. There is no natural limit to the accumulation of wealth; unlike hunger or sex, no satiation is possible. But this isn’t ex nihilo, it’s ex neighboro. Someone is working hard, and I’m taking her money.

Yet, like many a current problem, this may partly be a perversion of the agricultural drive. We were meant to tend a garden, and a garden does grow on its own. If I plant a tree, I have to care for it, but it does most of the work. I have to milk a cow, but she takes care of making more cows. This desire to tend, to guide something that lives and flourishes on its own and bears fruit, is here blameless and beautiful. That’s why everyone should have something that grows; I think that at bottom we don’t so much crave piles of cash as this excitement and risk and variety. We never know exactly how many apples we’re going to get, or how well the cucumbers are going to do, and there is some deep human need that can be well and truly satisfied by these little yearly dramas. Even the disappointments carry the seeds of future victories.

In a sense, if every hour brings only an hour’s pay, I have failed; I could have a tree sprouting apples, chickens laying eggs, flowers slowly spreading across my yard. And on a deeper level, my work itself must be worthwhile; if I build a house, I’ll get paid once, but it will bear fruit for as many years as people use it. The same cannot be said for preparing a tax return. I’m not getting paid at all for this blog, but at this moment you’re reading it; and whatever else I’m doing by now, these words are bearing fruit.

So in the end, the lust for other people’s money is a glimpse into our own repressed desire to be fruitful and multiply. A return on investment is the wrong kind of satisfaction, and so it can’t ever be enough.

I’ve only barely presented one of Elliott’s arguments, so I hope you enjoy the full book, and I’ll leave you with this mental image:

Another mathematical genius says, had one cent been loaned on the first day of January A.D. 1, interest being allowed at the rate of six per cent. compounded yearly, then 1895 years later—that is on January 1, 1895—the amount due would be $8,497,840,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (8,497,840,000 decillions). If it were desired to pay this in gold, 23.2 grains to the dollar, then taking spheres of pure gold the size of the earth, it would take 610,070,000,000,000,000 to pay for that cent. Placing these spheres in a straight row, their combined length would be 4,826,870,000,000,000,000 miles, a distance which it would take light (going at the rate of 186,330 miles per second) 820,890,000 years to travel.

The planets and stars of the entire solar and stellar universe, as seen by the great Lick telescope, if they were all in solid gold, would not nearly pay the amount. A single sphere to pay the whole amount, if placed with its centre at the sun, would have its surface extending 563,580,000 miles beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune, the farthest in our system.

It may be added that if the earth had contained a population of ten billions, each one making a million dollars a second, then to pay for that cent it would have required their combined earnings for 26,938,500,000,000,000,000,000 years.

Anyone can figure on this and see if it be correct.

Had Peter only thought to put one cent at interest, there would be no call now for Peter’s pence.

Blast. What was Peter thinking?

astine says:

I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to disagree with you.

The man you describe as a chump is not a chump. Sure, the ‘chump’ used the five dollars to buy lemons, honey and an ad, and all the wealth in addition to the five dollars is his production, but where would he be without the five dollars? The bank and yourself, not only afforded him the five dollars, but the means produce and be productive, and that is worth something.

How about a more concrete example, What if it wasn’t five dollars that he was loaned but a tractor? What if he used the tractor to till the earth and grow some stuff that he could sell? Generally, when you rent a tractor, or anything else, you are expected to pay a fee for the use of it. When you are done with the tractor, you not only owe the tractor back, but the fee as well.

It is similar with financial loans. The services that the bank provides you, and the interest that the man gives the bank, are payment for the usage of the five dollars. If the man borrowed the money, and then squandered it, he would be at fault, just as if a man rented a tractor and didn’t use and was thus unable to recoup the cost of renting would be responsible.

That’s what interest on a loan is. It is payment for the privilege of using someone else’s wealth to your own ends. If you can’t pay for the privilege, you have no business taking out a loan.

In this sense those who take out loans are not slaves, they are indentured servants.

This is also what is meant by the phrase ‘putting money to work for you.’ You could have used the money to buy your own lemons and ad and thus sold your own lemon aid. This is also a form of investment. Both the bank and the man could have been deprived of your five dollars, and gone hungry. But, because you (presumably) don’t have the time to use your wealth productively, you allow someone else to do it. You allow them to borrow your wealth. You receive less wealth than you would have otherwise, but you still receive wealth. Whether you do it yourself or allow the other to use it, the money is being used to produce wealth and is ‘being put to work.’ Trillions of dollars of wealth, that would otherwise sit around useless, is transported, for a fee, around the world to people who can use it to produce. What once was wasted is now put to use.

As productive vs non-productive loans, all loans are potentially productive. The impetus is on the loaned as to whether the loan is put to good use. Generally, with a car loan, some form of transportation to commute to and from work unless one lives in a big city. Hence, a car loan is productive because one needs a car to have a job. If one uses a loan to buy a car they don’t need, or they buy a car they will never be able to pay off, that is their fault.

Generally banks and other loan agencies will avoid providing loans to people who can’t afford them because it is not good for the agency. If you can’t afford to pay the bank back, why should they let you have the money? If would be like loaning out a tractor to a bum without land on which to use it. Such things are in the realm of charity, not business. If you wanted to give your five dollars to someone in need, I presume you would have done so.

Whether or not more people should give their hard earned cash to charities than to banks, however, is another topic entirely.

July 21st, 2007 at 8:43 pm

Bill Powell says:

Andrew! Good to hear from you again.

The ‘chump’ in question is of course a hard worker; I dubbed him thus in sympathy, not derision. His ‘chumpiness’ in this context is merely because the poor fellow has to pay the extra interest in addition to the loan.

I am going to restate my argument quickly, since I don’t think you address it directly. Wealth decays. Sorry if you addressed that and I missed it. You still seem to be operating on the assumption that I can just let my five dollars sit for twenty years and it will remain preserved in value. It won’t, and everyone knows it. I agree that the five dollars are necessary for our friend’s work, and that is worth something, but the thrust of my argument is that merely to return the five dollars intact, adjusted up for inflation, requires work, and that work is also worth something. So we aren’t disagreeing over whether the lender deserves something for the service of the loan; only what that “something” is.

The case is the same with the tractor. To use a tractor is to wear it out, but to let it sit unused is to let it decay. Suppose I borrow the tractor, use it, and return it in precisely the condition I found it. I can only achieve that by doing some kind of maintenance on the machine; in short, by performing a service. In real life, it’s probably impossible to do that completely, so perhaps a small fee is appropriate to compensate for unavoidable wear on the larger parts, but this fee is radically different from the concept of paying a rent to the lender as a profit. That is the question; why does the lender deserve a profit over and above the maintenance and preservation of his tool, whether the tool be a tractor or money?

I also agree that you do have to “pay the bank back,” even if you squander the loan, and no one has to lend five dollars (at least in a business context) to someone if they don’t expect to get their money back intact. We’re not disagreeing over whether the people should repay their loans, of course, but whether lenders can demand additional money over and above the value of what they loaned.

The crux is this issue of “putting money to work.” If I don’t have time to use my five dollars to make lemonade, what is my five dollars going to do? Rot. Lose value. Inflate. So if you borrow my five dollars and maintain it, you have done me a service. It is a privilege for you to use my wealth, but it is also a privilege for me to have my wealth maintained. This is no charity, but a business transaction. With usury, the lender pays nothing for this service, and has the audacity to demand an additional payment over and above the service rendered to him.

In a world without usury, those trillions of dollars of wealth would not necessarily sit around useless, as lenders might still prefer to loan out their wealth rather then let it rot.

But in the present system, you can write, “Whether you do it yourself or allow the other to use it, the money is being used to produce wealth and is being ‘put to work,’” and it sounds like since it’s my money being put to the work, I deserve a cut. But my money isn’t doing the work. Either I or you are doing the work, and it does rather seem that whoever does the work should keep the profits. Yes, the money is my tool; but that’s why you have to give it back. If I let you keep the five dollars, that would be charity. If you take care of it for me, and it would otherwise have to rot, that’s business.

As to “every loan being potentially productive,” if anything, you illustrate the need for a radical re-evaluation of usury. Or perhaps you’re just fatally ignoring the difference between tools I can buy to make wealth (lemons), and goods I buy to consume (like food). I’m not sure. It seems obvious to me that if I use five dollars to buy dinner, I owe you five dollars, but I didn’t make any further profit, so why should you get any? I could have made a profit, but this fond dream, I must sternly remind you, does nothing towards actualizing real cash. I also wish I’d made some money, but no one’s tossing me any quarters.

On the other hand, the food is keeping me alive; if I was dead, I could not make money. A solemn thought. In fact, if I need money for a kidney transplant, it is undeniably certain that I will be able to make more profit thanks to my new kidney than if I was writhing around in the throes of agony. But this highlights the problematic nature of the whole concept; since I can no longer work without using this kidney, does it follow that you deserve a cut of my profits for the rest of my life? I bought it with your money, and even though I return the money intact, I continue to use the kidney. Every day I go to work, every cent I make, I profit from the money you leant me! It’s rather a scandal…seriously, if you have a right to the profit made from your tool, how would you evaluate the economic worth of a kidney?

But this point doesn’t seriously affect my argument, since I’m arguing that any share in profits that you haven’t helped to produce by your own work is usury, and thus theft.

So it seems you still need to show that wealth left unattended does not rot. If you can, I’m curious, as that’s at the core of this argument. At that point we can fall back on the distinction between productive and non-productive loans. Thanks for your comment!

July 22nd, 2007 at 1:21 am

astine says:

Hello again.

I didn’t address your claim that wealth ‘decays’ because I don’t dispute it, though I dislike the term. Commodities and capital, under normal conditions tend to loose value. Though, even the most slapdash tractor rental maintains it’s own equipment.

Going back to analogy of a tractor rental, generally the shop, not only purchases the tractors, but they also store them and maintain them. This is very expensive, and is hard work. They make money, and pay for this, by loaning out the tractors and charging a rent. They act as a repository of tractors for people who don’t need tractors enough to purchase and maintain their own. If the people who rented tractors, merely borrowed them and returned them as good as new, the tractor rental would go out of business. Their business would cover maintenance of the tractor while it was away, but not storage of it, purchase of it, or maintenance of if while it was at the rental. So just because they provide something in addition to what they were given doesn’t mean that are providing enough.

Of course this analogy ignores several things about the ‘decay’ of wealth. One is that at least part of this ‘decay’ comes from use. A tractor kept in a shed, safe from the elements, is going to last at lot longer than a tractor driven though the mud every day. Also, it is literally impossible to give a tractor back in the same condition as when you got it if you put it through any use. A very large part of the ‘decay’ is the renter’s fault.

Currency is a slightly different matter though, because it’s ‘decay’ is not something inherent to it. Inflation is caused by the Federal Reserve over-printing money. Also, it’s not something that’s ‘maintained’ in the normal sense of the word. If a man borrows from you five dollars and holds on to it for more than a year, surly he owes you back more at the end of the year. The five dollars he gives back is not worth the five dollars you gave him. This is hardly a business transaction.

All this is beside the point though, because, like the tractor rental, the business of loaning costs money and time. The business of transporting trillions of dollars and making it available on demand to anyone willing to take out a loan is itself expensive and laborious. When you pay interest on a loan, you are paying, not only for the banker’s salary, but for the transportation of the money, the accounting of the money, the temporary housing of the money, the bureaucracy behind the money, the computers and database to track the money, and the risk that the banker takes in loaning you the money.

Sure, in a world without interest loans, people would loan goods to each other, but it wouldn’t be in the same quantity as today, because that kind of availability costs money. This availability takes work and so anyone using loaned money to produce, has produced only with the help of said work. Therefore, anyone who provides money, deserves a share of the profits.

—

As to productive vs non-productive, I think I’ll be even clearer. If you are using a loan to buy food, you shouldn’t be taking out a loan, period.

July 22nd, 2007 at 5:29 pm

Bill Powell says:

Andrew,

Thanks for clarifying a bit. The tractor rental is an interesting example. We agree that if you borrow a tractor, you need to pay something or do extra work to keep it in the condition you borrowed it. A maintenance fee is surely one way to do this. Of course I know that if that’s all the renter pays, there can be no profit and thus no such thing as a rental business. But up to now, we’ve been talking merely about the loan of a tractor; I’ve assumed that the lender usually uses the tractor himself. Here, the additional work needed to organize the loan is a ten-minute conversation; I suppose you can pay him for that if you must.

But I am inclined to argue that a rental business almost always includes a significant non-productive drain on wealth, and that in the real world, owners of rental businesses are not asking to be paid to store and maintain tools and organize their use, but to be paid to pay other people to perform some or all of these services. I am very skeptical of the need for full-time managers in such a situation, and it seems that people are better served by a joint ownership and maintenance of such tools. This provides a minimum need for overhead, and thus the tractor is at maximum efficiency per dollar spent.

However, I can see the argument for certain limited situations where a community has so many temporary needs for so many tools that a person could conceivably work full-time to keep track of all the transactions and check up on the maintenance, even if someone else did it. I can still envision a simpler solution, but as long as each person is getting paid proportionally for the work they do, the system is just.

But the business of organizing and maintaining tools is fatally flawed as an analogy for usury. When you rent a tractor, do they ask for a percentage of your corn?

There is a radical difference between paying someone a set fee for a particular service (maintaining, organizing, storing, and so on), and paying them a percentage of your profits because you were using their tool while you made them. The latter is usury, because the lender is getting paid for work he did not do. He does not deserve a share in the profits. He deserves a set fee for services rendered, like anyone else.

Thus a mortage company is quite unlike a rental business. The work a mortgage company does in providing loans is about as mentally and physically exacting as data entry. Oh, all right, fine, computer programing. Maybe. Are you seriously going to maintain that the trillions of dollars of interest that course through this world like rivers of blood are all compensation, dollar for dollar, for the mere mental and physical work of loaning this money?

If so, I would like to hear it. It would be a great relief. But I hesitate to assume that the average banker aspires only to the noble salary of a computer programmer.

While I know the hilarious rate of our inflation is due to the shenanigans of the Federal Reserve, currency will always have a certain decay because it has to have a physical embodiment, whether paper, gold, or a hard drive, and anything physical has to be maintained in good condition and protected from theft. However minimal this need may be (and today it isn’t), the need is real.

So I still don’t know why returning someone’s five dollars after a year, plus extra so it’s still worth the same as when you borrowed it, isn’t a business transaction. You got the service of using the five dollars, he got the service of your extra work to keep the money protected and keep it’s worth up, instead of it rotting (however slowly) in his drawer or getting stolen. Isn’t an exchange of services a business transaction?

As the system is now, whatever just compensation a lender deserves is always obtained by means of their usurious interest. Without usury, if I chose to deposit my money in a credit union, I would actually have to pay them a minimal fee for the bare physical service of maintaining the computers, processing transactions, and so on. It doesn’t make sense for me to get this for free when they’re providing a service; this only encourages them to wring unjust profits from the people who come for loans. Similarly, the people who came for loans would also pay a fee for the mental and physical work of making the loan. This would be the only money the credit union made, because these are the only services they actually provide by their own work. Thus the banking industry could settle down into a comfortable frugality, and sleep in peace, knowing they were being paid a just wage for the exhausting toil of sitting in air-conditioned offices, using a computer, and thinking. Hard.

Perhaps, in this world, people wouldn’t loan so many goods to each other. True enough. And perhaps we would not have quite so incomprehensible a national debt. And perhaps Popes would not have to make explicit calls for the restructuring or forgiveness of debts to various Third World countries to prevent their economic collapse. There’s a world of possibilities.

As to non-productive loans: I applaud your ideal of always having enough money on hand for the necessities of life. I agree. But people are occasionally broke. Really, it happens. What do you suggest? That they go looking for charity? Or that they borrow money, and keep working so they can pay it back? Or that they do the right economic thing, and starve? Also, I’m not sure an entrepreneur would appreciate your sentiments; doesn’t the average business run at a loss for its first three years or so? Until he’s in the red, isn’t he borrowing a certain portion of money for food, not to mention clothes, Netflix, and so on?

And what do you propose if I can’t pay for a kidney? I still can’t see why, on your model, the lender deserves anything less than a share in my profits for every day I use it.

July 24th, 2007 at 6:39 pm

Lorraine says:

I read the original post, though I haven’t followed the comments. In any case, very well said. It’s funny how the truth can be satisfying and disheartening at the same time.

July 25th, 2007 at 8:32 pm

astine says:

I’m sorry, I don’t have the time to respond to your arguments in full but I will say a few things.

First is this:

“There is a radical difference between paying someone a set fee for a particular service (maintaining, organizing, storing, and so on), and paying them a percentage of your profits because you were using their tool while you made them.”

Loan’s don’t work this way. The percentage is not of profit but of the loan. If I loan someone five hundred dollars at 5% annual interest compounded constantly, he doesn’t owe me interest on his profits but on the loan.

What you’re thinking of is stocks, which are fundamentally different than loans. When someone buys a stock they are literally purchasing a piece of the company and so are entitled to the profits and a say in how the business is run. Generally, going public (the process of opening a company up to the stock market) is a good way of acquiring a lot of quick capital, but it has major costs so only very ambitious companies attempt it. People don’t typically go public and mortgages don’t ask people for a share of their profits.

“Thus a mortage company is quite unlike a rental business. The work a mortgage company does in providing loans is about as mentally and physically exacting as data entry. Oh, all right, fine, computer programing. Maybe. Are you seriously going to maintain that the trillions of dollars of interest that course through this world like rivers of blood are all compensation, dollar for dollar, for the mere mental and physical work of loaning this money?”

In answer to this question: Hell yeah, and for two reasons:

First, banks actually make a much smaller profit than people realize. Banks typically list both loans and borrowed money as assets, because loans they can call on and borrowed money they can spend. Because these banks tend to loan each other a lot of money (It all pyramids from the Fed,) their assets are usually overstated by many times.

Basically, it happens like this: The Fed loans some of the huge banks some money. Those banks then loan that same money to some smaller banks money which loan the money to even smaller banks. By the time it reaches a point where it can be used, dozens of banks have already listed the some money as an asset.

Not all of money that banks they handle are profits. Most of them are merely assets. When a bank buys a new office complex, they aren’t spending their money, but your money. They merely loan this money and merely receive a percentage in return. Even this percentage doesn’t count as profit as they have to use it to cover costs in the form of non-payable loans, of which there are millions. Even very large corporations often fail to pay up on loans and banks pay for this out of pocket. There is actually a lot of risk involved in the loan and investment business (so much so that its a technical term,) and the possibility of going bankrupt is an ever present reality. (or would be if it weren’t for the Fed.)

Second, Do you have any idea what it costs to keep track of all that moving money? Large banks spend millions on computers and storage centers to track their books for them. Firms like JPMC literally have large warehouses that contain floor after floor of storage arrays (sized in the petabyte,)and they use very pricey applications to maintain these. They need databases just to keep track of their databases. (I know this much for a fact because my current line of work involves making applications to track these databases.) This is before the costs of actually hiring millions of tellers, engineers, programmers, data-entry people to actually use these data-centers. This is also ignoring costs of insurance, legal fees, and actually providing the services you use. I think just taking responsibility for all of this entitles one to a lot.

Not that I’m saying labor implies entitlement. Value is relative to use, and entitlement is based on productivity not labor. Working long hours on something that nobody cares about entitles you to nothing. Value is defined as precisely what people pay for it. If nobody wants it, it has no value, and if people want it, it has value. This has nothing to do with how much work went into making it. This work merely affects the supply and if someone can increase supply without increasing their own workload, then they are entitled to the difference.

“As to non-productive loans: I applaud your ideal of always having enough money on hand for the necessities of life. I agree. But people are occasionally broke. Really, it happens. What do you suggest? That they go looking for charity? Or that they borrow money, and keep working so they can pay it back? Or that they do the right economic thing, and starve? Also, I’m not sure an entrepreneur would appreciate your sentiments; doesn’t the average business run at a loss for its first three years or so? Until he’s in the red, isn’t he borrowing a certain portion of money for food, not to mention clothes, Netflix, and so on?”

They ought to go looking for charity. If you are so hard up for cash that you cannot feed yourself, you should look for charity. If a bank gives you money and demands no interest, then that is charity. Going broke is a fact of life, that’s for what family and friends are. Besides, it’s never been so easy to avoid going broke in today’s society.

That said, in a sense, substance loans are a form of productive loan. If they are taking a loan so they can buy food, bay bills, and keep working, then they are getting a productive loan. IE., the loan allows them to keep working and thus keep making money and keep productive. It is up to them to make sure that happens, and look at the terms of the loan before hand so they know they can pay it back.

As per entrepreneurs, I hope to be one myself within a few years and I appreciate my sentiments. The loans that you take out for business are productive. It’s a massive risk that can ruin you and it involves a lot of hardship in the first few years, but the risk is part of what makes it worth it. I imagine that most entrepreneurs value the free market because that is what gave them the opportunity to be entrepreneurs. Without a loan, a lot of the money necessary for starting a business would be hard to come by. Either way, nobody owes you the opportunity for your own startup.

(With regard to needing new kidneys, that’s what insurance is for.)

————————————————–

I’ll leave you with this simple hypothetical: What say I were to ask you for 10 thousand dollars to start some business. Let’s say I’ll be manufacturing a brand new architecture for computers. Now let’s say I promise to pay it back within three years time plus inflation.

Now, if you had that kind of money on hand and I was a close friend of your’s, you might say yes. But since I’m a casual acquaintance, you’ve never even met me in person (though we’ve come close,) you might be a little more skeptical. If you’d never met me before, you’d be more skeptical still and would probably want some insurance that I wouldn’t waste your money and not be able to pay it back. The mere promise of staying above inflation is not worth the risk that my idea might not be all it’s cracked up to be. That’s why I might offer to pay you back in interest, the offer of actual profit would encourage you to loan me the money. This is why interest exists, merely maintaining money is not worth the risk of loaning it. If it was, people would loan it without asking for greater promises. As it is, greater promises are required.

July 27th, 2007 at 7:45 pm

Bill Powell says:

Andrew—thanks for keeping this up!

I’m happy to admit all you say about the costs and perils of usurious moneylending, and the nightmarish complexity of it all, but after you deduct for all these services, fortunes are still made from what’s left over. My argument is that lenders should get paid a just fee for the work they do, and no more. As it is, they generally get paid for the work they do, and a lot more. Do you really want to deny that fortunes are routinely made by moneylending, or the power of these national and international financiers? If so, do you want to look the figures up or shall I?

Piracy on the high seas is also a difficult, dangerous trade. So is shipping slaves. And so is open-heart surgery. The dangers and costs of a trade are no argument for or against its justice.

Remember that I’m arguing against usury in the context of our other, larger argument about the abuse of workers; that’s a similar situation, where executives steal a huge share of the work of others, far more than they’re entitled to from their service of leadership.

I understand how you distinguish between loans and stocks, but I’m arguing that any usurious interest (as opposed to a set fee), is a share in the borrower’s profits. After all, that is precisely where the interest has to come from. With a stock, the lender is directly using the money to produce profits, so this connection is visible and obvious. With a loan, the lender might or might not be using the money to produce profits, but every cent of interest he pays has to come from profits on his own work; where else is it going to come from? A stock is calculated as a share, while a loan is calculated on the sum loaned (and its interest), but the result is the same; the lender receives money beyond payment for services he renders, money for work the borrower does.

“Working long hours on something that nobody cares about entitles you to nothing.”

Yes.

“Value is defined as precisely what people pay for it.”

No. This is going back to our other unfinished argument about whether you can make someone work all day making shirts for you, but pay him a starvation wage.

“In a sense, substance loans are a form of productive loan. If they are taking a loan so they can buy food, pay bills, and keep working, then they are getting a productive loan.”

Exactly. This is why I disagree with Belloc’s division of productive and non-productive loans. This is also why you can’t skirt the kidney question by pointing to insurance as the conventional way to pay for that operation. However, since you seem to see no problem in paying a mortgage company $150,000 or $200,000 in interest on a loan to buy a $100,000 house, I needn’t press the kidney analogy.

If a bank gives you money and demands no fee, that’s charity, or rather, a charitable discount, since you still have to pay back the loan. They should demand an inflation bonus plus a fee, which is payment for services rendered, rather than interest, which is that payment plus an unjust share in the borrower’s profits.

Your hypothetical startup is a great example. Would I give you, Andrew Stine, such a loan? Well, I don’t have 10 thousand dollars. If I had only 10 thousand dollars, it would be wiser to pay the credit union to look after it for me. But if I had 50 thousand dollars, and lived in a world without usury, I might risk loaning you the 10 thousand to avoid paying the credit union to look after it. That is my incentive; rather than pay someone to care for it, you’ll do the service of maintaining and guarding it. Naturally, in our present economy, that incentive looks ridiculously small, but if usury wasn’t an option, that incentive might start to look rather good. Remember that if I do nothing, I lose money.

Of course you’d have to sell me on the idea, as well as demonstrate your ability to pay me back some other way if the idea bombs, but you have to do that anyway. And though you keep throwing around the word charity, if your business bombs, you will still owe me 10 thousand dollars plus inflation. Charity would be giving you the 10 thousand dollars, or else saying you needn’t pay me back if your business bombs. I say you have to pay me back either way, even if it means flipping organic burgers.

And if you can’t? This is the risk that you say entitles me to extra compensation; either you lose all my money, or if you don’t, I get lots extra because you could have lost all my money. But I do not think this risk deserves extra compensation. I have never seen this concept adequately explained. I can see why an (unjust) incentive encourages people to take this risk, but again the analogy with piracy is unavoidable. Just because people do it doesn’t mean they ought. Does anyone compensate you if you lose your own $10,000? Or if you ship $10,000 worth of your new computers COD and the check never comes? Calculated risk is part of life. And don’t forget that delinquent borrowers do get taken to court.

It’s true that today the risk factor is horribly exacerbated by the legal climate; it’s entirely too easy to default on loans, declare bankruptcy, and in general evade financial responsibility. Since in practice people are often evading usurious interest as well, I’m not going to go out tomorrow and rally over this, but the point remains; if there were no usury, and people knew that if they borrowed money, they would personally have to pay it back unless they were physically incapacitated, the risk factor in lending might plummet.

There’s another reason I might loan you that money; perhaps your actual business will profit me somehow. We are, after all, living in the same economy. Perhaps your new architecture will make it possible for my own business to run more profitably. Perhaps you’ll open a computer store, which will bring more traffic to my own store down the street. If I sit on my $10,000, I won’t get that benefit.

Without usury as an incentive, perhaps the entrepreneurs who would tend to get loans would be those whose ideas were so good that their realization would benefit not only themselves, but the lender, and even the larger community. If in five years I can get my money back, its value maintained, as well as more customers to my own store, as well as the opportunity to buy your better computers, it looks like I have several reasons to loan you that money after all.

Thanks again for taking your time for this discussion, Andrew. I appreciate it.

July 28th, 2007 at 6:02 pm

John Médaille says:

I think you have correctly located the production of wealth in labor; only the work of man combined the gifts of nature can produce wealth. What then are we to make of the claims of capital, and with them, the claims to interest? If only labor produces wealth, then surely capital can have no share.

But capital does have a share; the man who makes lemonade surely first needs some capital to buy lemons. Must all investment be a matter of charity, with no claim to the output beyond the restoration of the original sum? This seems a great problem until we understand what capital actually is: Capital is stored-up labor.

Think of a man who plants and harvests a crop. The increase is his, due only to his labor and the gift of nature. No one, save the thief and the taxman would deny him any part of his reward. However, if he wishes to plant a crop next year, he must deny himself part of the reward; that is, he must save some seed-corn. If he does not, he will have none for next year, and will have to go to the poor-house or (worse) to the bankers. That seed-corn is no less a product of his labor, but quite obviously is also his “capital” to begin next year’s planting.

So here is the great secret: The rights of labor and the rights of capital are the same rights; labor and capital are the same things in different forms. Capital is the product of labor saved from prior-period production, and hence has the same rights as labor. So just as the one who provides “current-period” labor has rights to the output, so too does the one provides “prior-period” labor (that is, capital).

The problem is therefore not interest on a loan, per se, but interest on a non-productive loan, or with interest rates that exceed the productivity of the loan. Capitalism, as the name implies, elevates the rights of capital over the rights of labor. This distorts the proper relationship, which is one where the rights are proportional to each because the spring from precisely the same source. To prohibit interest on all loans is, in my opinion, to make an argument that makes all arguments against usury sound foolish, when in fact it is the most economically sound argument in all of economics.

July 28th, 2007 at 10:46 pm

Bill Powell says:

Dear Mr. Medaille,

Thanks for joining in! Your gracious and lucid comments are much appreciated. I’m glad to have the perspective of another Distributist.

I’d hesitate to say that capital has rights. Without delving too deeply into rights theory, perhaps we could agree that neither capital nor labor have rights, but capitalists or laborers—that is, people. A pile of money is a thing; it has no rights. The question is whether anyone has a right to it.

So in your excellent example of the farmer who plants and harvests a crop, he (as laborer) has a right to the corn because of his labor. If the laborer saves some corn as seed, he also becomes (technically) a capitalist. His work (labor) was rewarded by corn (wealth), some of which he saved as seed corn (capital). But does the seed corn have a right to be guarded from rats, or planted, or anything? No. It just sits there.

All year, as he worked, the laborer-capitalist had a right to the eventual harvest, but now he has the corn, and his right has been satisfied. The season is over. He’s even.

We have to imagine our friend sitting on a hay bale in December, finishing off the last cob, coolly regarding the bag of seed which is all that’s left from a whole season of muscle cramps. He has consumed all the fruits of his labor save this last bit of capital. No one owes him a thing. It’s a post-Eden moment.

Now if the thief makes a tardy appearance and steals the seed, he’ll have to give it back; we know the laborer-capitalist has a right to that capital because he gained it by his labor.

But suppose the thief, a data entry specialist, confesses his frustrated agricultural impulses, begs forgiveness, and agrees to buy the seed for five dollars. The seed now belongs to him, and the farmer instead has a right to the five dollars.

Now how is he going to get another year’s worth of corn out of a five dollar bill?

Apparently, with some kinds of capital (seed, cows, apple trees), nature makes them grow, with a little human help. Since we’re both Distributists, we won’t argue over whether we humans can merrily appropriate the corn and milk and apples that nature works so hard to make. We work some, nature works a lot, and we take as much as we can. (The urgent question of our duties to nature is another matter.)

But other kinds of capital (money, hammers) are quite different. They’re dead. Nothing very exciting is going to happen to a five dollar bill or a hammer unless a human uses it. If the farmer is used to capital growing because he plants seeds, he’s in for a boring year with his new fiver. And even the seeds won’t grow without his help.

So we must decide on what basis a human has a right to the fruits of human labor. I say that a human has a right only to the fruits of his own labor. (Human relationships are another question, such as a child having the right to be fed by his parents.) If you work, you get the reward. If you don’t work, you don’t eat. We humans are allowed to appropriate the work of nature, but not the work of other humans. The former is stewardship, the latter is larceny.

It’s not labor or capital that produces wealth, but laborers, or, as you said, the work of man combined with the gifts of nature. Thus to charge interest (rather than certain fees discussed earlier) on even a productive loan is usury, because only the borrower, not the lender, works to produce wealth.

Capital may be a necessary tool for the borrower, but it is always a thing, not a human. To equate capital with labor is a world away from equating capital with laboring. This is the fatal confusion at the heart of usury; we do not have the right to anything done with our tools, but only to our tools. If you borrow my hoe to tend a garden, do I do any work? The only working human involved is you. I must not, like the thief or the taxman, deprive you of the fruits of your own labor. I have only the right to get my tool back intact.

This is not charity, but justice. If I give you my money, that’s charity. If I loan it, I have a right to expect my money back, even if your business fails. Where’s the charity?

Looking at people, rather than things, doesn’t it seem that to charge interest is to demand multiple payments for one round of labor? The farmer works hard to make his seed corn or his five dollars, but once he gets it, his right is satisfied. If he wants more corn or money, he’ll have to go out and do more work himself.

While restricting usury to low rates on clearly productive loans would at least prevent borrowers from being impoverished even as they labor, we would still be enmeshed in the same fundamental dynamic of greed: lenders being paid justly as they worked to earn their capital, then unjustly as borrowers used the capital as a tool in their own work. Let a man only save enough capital, and he could legally steal for the rest of his days.

Thanks again for taking time to comment! A pleasure to meet you, and I look forward to perusing your blog in more detail.

July 30th, 2007 at 8:35 pm

astine says:

Quick note, seed isn’t capital, it’s raw material. Tools, like a plowshare would be capital.

Also, owning capital doesn’t make one a “Capitalist.” (Capitalism is a Marxist term and I use it as such.) A “Capitalist” is one who uses tools to “control” the labor force. In this sense a lone farmer with seed cannot be a “Capitalist” unless he employs young men to work on his farm for him.

I’ll be back later with actual answers. Since we are back in the same debate again, I think it might be best to finish some of those drafts I worked out before hand.

July 31st, 2007 at 3:42 pm

astine says:

Actually I’ll leave something (and you can splice this with the previous comment if you want.)

I think the root problem with Distributism is the same as the root problem with Marxism, that is, it implies the Labor Theory of Value. (The Marxist version, not the Lockean one.) The problem is that it equates right with amount labored. That is, it assumes that one not only has a right because they labor, but that their right is proportional to that labor. This is as opposed to Free Market theory, which attributes right to amount produced, (which is itself determined by the needs of the market.)

Here is an illustration:

Let’s take your farmer and say that he produces 100 barrels of grain a year. Let’s say he’s the only farmer around and so people are willing to buy his grain at a premium, let’s say $200 dollars a barrel. This farmer has worked X amount and has produced $20,000 dollars worth of grain.

Now let’s say he has a bad year and only produces 10 barrels of grain. People are still paying a premium, but he can’t sell as much. Because there is less he is able to sell the grain at a greater cost so at $500 a barrel he makes $5,000 dollars. He put through the same amount of work, but produced less.

Now let’s give him some competition; another farmer moves in across the street and produces the same amount of grain. They both have a ‘good’ year and produce 100 barrels apiece. Now, because there is more grain on the market and the same demand for it (this has remained constant throughout the hypothetical,) the grain is worth less, so the farmer is able to sell his grain for say, $100 dollars a barrel and he makes $10,000 this year.

Each of the three years described, the farmer labored the same amount, but his labor benefited society to differing degrees. The Marxist would say that because his work was the same each year, he would be entitled to the same rewards each year. The Free Market proponent would disagree, on moral grounds: Why should society sacrifice the same for less? Or be forced to buy more than they need at the same price? To do so would change the amount that each was rewarded for their labor.

The material worth of everything, including labor, is dependent on the circumstances; that is, material worth is inherent relative. Things like real utility (as opposed to potential utility) are dependent on the situation in which items are to be employed.

Even things like food, which are absolutely necessary for life, have a value relative to it’s availability; If you have one chicken breast, every bit may be necessary to get to the next week, but if you have a million chicken breasts, you better not eat them all before the week is out.

Things like air are not free because they are necessary, but because no one has to produce them, supply is effectively infinite. Air is free, but it’s potential value is infinite because it is so necessary.

It’s impossible to reward anyone proportionally for their labor or for the utility of their work because the value of these things change. The best that can be done is for people to trade based on a. what people are willing to pay for something (supply) b. what people are willing to sell it for (demand) People have tried to subvert this fact of life, Socialist Eastern Europe, Emperor Nehru of India, Mao, etc… and people have always ended up losing out, both individuals, and society as a whole. The reason is because doing so goes against nature. Supply and Demand are facts of nature. The Labor Theory of Value is more like contraception.

Because a borrower is willing to pay interest on a loan shows that the loan is both worth that interest to him, and the lender. They came to an agreement as to what was a fair price, otherwise the transaction would never have taken place.

So even if all bankers ever did was sit on their @$$es and count money laughing about the interest that they were able to get people to pay, (nothing could be further from the truth,) they still would be entitled to that interest because people felt that the loans were worth it. There is not other satisfactory measure.

July 31st, 2007 at 4:48 pm

Bill Powell says:

Andrew — thanks again. It seems that dried corn seeds aren’t exactly raw material, since they’ve been somewhat processed, but if the term affects the overall argument, please clarify. As for the term capitalist, Marx may have invented it, but I’ve certainly seen the term used by many an enthusiastic self-styled capitalist with a much broader meaning, something like: a person who owns or controls a lot of wealth and uses it to produce more wealth (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary). However, I don’t mind confining its meaning to the Marxist sense; that’ll keep the word useful.

Your second comment indeed hearkens back to our discussion of Chinese factory workers, and you’ve illuminated our differences beautifully. When you put it like that, it becomes very easy for me to see your viewpoint; either people get rewarded on what they actually produce, and this reward comes directly from what other people are actually willing to pay, or … we start inventing rights based on effort, and get into all kinds of trouble. It’s a straightforward position.

I have two responses. The first is a recap of what started that whole other discussion; socialists have certainly caused a lot of suffering, but so has the modern free market. Our present system is not a satisfactory measure. If you can argue against socialism from Chinese misery under Mao, I can jolly well argue against our own system from Chinese misery making shoes for Puma. (The National Labor Coalition has many documented reports on the exact living conditions in particular factories around the world.)

My second reply is that if socialism doesn’t work, and if our free market doesn’t work, perhaps they are both too simple for the real world. Perhaps socialism tends to regard only the value of labor, while the free market tends to regard only the realities of supply and demand. Can’t we regard both? As far as I can tell, Distributism is the attempt to look at the whole economic picture. Yes, there must be supply and demand, some people must get paid more in a day then others, and if you want to make money, you’re going to have to make something people want. But at the same time, we’re talking about people; if we turn around and realize that vast numbers of real live people are working twelve-hour days making profitable items and yet have to borrow money to buy food, we have a problem. These workers are producing goods, and other people do want them; something must be broken somewhere that needs fixing. a As I said before, the most free market in the world is in reality fettered on every side by oppressive laws against potentially profitable transactions such as fraud, robbery, and even usury (in the current legal sense). There’s nothing in the law of Supply and Demand that forbids you demanding my wallet at gunpoint; considered as an economic transaction, I’m the one getting a steal. But almost everyone agrees that the free market won’t work without these restrictions. A Distributist is arguing (in part) for a particular set of restrictions; he is not placing himself over and against the law of supply and demand. To oppose Wal-Mart is not to support Mao; there are more than two possible economic systems in this world.

August 2nd, 2007 at 7:08 pm

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