Understanding Usury
 
 
   The various public attempts to explain fiat money have resulted in
considerable bogus understanding, in forum discussion, of fiat money and
of the real structure and effects of usury and renting. For example:
  Zeitgeist Movement Forum about money
   Real money is a verifiable measured portion of precious metal, or a
promissory note from a legally accountable agency declaring a willingness to
trade measured metal for the note, on demand. When real money was the only
legal tender, the spurious use of promissory notes would generally elicit a
major bank run every 25 to 35 years, that resulted in considerable tragedy.
   Fiat money is a limited edition collectible paper art piece that has
been declared by a government to be legal tender for tax payments. It is
not a debt to anyone or any agent. It is created as a trading convenience
that avoids the vulnerability of a bank run by being an actual item of
value. The folk wisdom that refers to fiat money as worthless arises from
recognition that the value of all collectibles is a market quirk of any
item that is in artificially limited production. A producer of a limited
edition, such as art prints, can generally control the market value of their
products by how many they make in a given offering, and how closely the new
offering resembles the previous ones. And getting it declared legal tender
for tax payments gives it a minimum default market value.
   Local script is a bookkeeping system involving the recording of hours of
work, which get erased when the worker obtains a comparable benefit of
assistance from another member of the system. Some local scripts have been
converted into a fiat money.
   Usury is a fee charged by a holder of either kind of money, for a
specific time period of use by another person or agency.
   Rent is usury charged for use of a tangible item or piece of real estate
for a specific period.
   Rent and usury can be paid with tangible items, portions of real estate,
services or either kind of money. The use of nonmonetary payment is a major
factor missing in many peoples' understanding of usury payments.
   In an ideal system, all agents and individuals maintain assets to offer
for rent or usury in an amount equal to what they use of other peoples'
assets, and the result is balanced exchange. In the real world, many agents
and individuals maintain a condition of asset use far exceeding their asset
offering, resulting in an imbalance of payments. This kind of imbalance is
nearly always combined with a practice of paying in money first until that
is exhausted, and then attempting to cover the balance in firesale trading
of materials or services. Jacque Fresco tells the story of such an event in
his early life, in his movie called Future by Design. The feeling of tragedy
is tremendous, with the creditor feeling forced into an evil role and the
delinquent losing much more than they owe.
   The motive for creating such an asset imbalance appears to be a wish to
present the illusion, to associates, of having a legitimate place in a more
advanced or expensive culture. This wish gets encouraged by salespeople of
all sorts, but particularly by car and real estate salespeople, with the
result that a very large subculture of people, at all levels of income, are
locked into a lifestyle that feels like slavery, due to the usury and rental
costs of the pretense.
   Governments at all levels worldwide confuse these matters further by
issuing bonds, burdening the tax system with usury cost that makes taxation
seem all the more like slavery. The U.S. federal government takes this one
step further into greater loss, with a request, to the "Federal Reserve"
Bank (a private bank commissioned to issue the national currency), for an
increase in the number of their notes in circulation, and a bulk purchase of
U.S. treasury bonds using them.
   As with any limited edition collectible, the result of the dilution of
the supply is a value reduction of the notes, called inflation. The
inflation effect can be reduced though, by increasing the total asset level
in the related economy. Whenever a new commercial asset, such as a football
stadium or a new application for computer use, is created, the new owner
creates a micro-economy that swallows up some of the available collectible
trade material, making whatever remains gain in market value. This is
refereed to as economic growth. Due to gross avaricious bond sales by the
federal government using new currency, historical economic growth has
generally been too feeble to prevent inflation.
   Both fiat money and all other forms of limited edition collectibles can
be legitimately viewed as a scam. In the case of Federal Reserve Notes, the
legal tender label gives them guaranteed initial market value that is quite
unearned, and becomes new wealth in the "Federal Reserve" Bank.
   This same trick is done by all banks though, through the device of
creating bank checks, promissory notes, credit card accounts and the like,
wherein actual Federal Reserve Notes are only promised rather than actually
held, resulting in new illusory value. As long as everyone has faith in the
legitimacy of the bank drafts the bank can make use of it as new wealth.
   A similar trick happens with some forms of "economic growth". A new asset
that gets market response value in excess of the real effort required to
create the asset, such a when a new company successfully joins a stock
exchange ("goes public"), can create a lot of stock certificates, that can
be traded with.
   Thus a great deal of the wealth of wealthy people originates without
actual contribution to the shared economy. And, due to the wealthy people
having more than enough income already to meet living expenses, this usually
results in more usury or rental income. Through this, usury and rent become
associated with unearned wealth, even though much of what regular people
offer for rent was earned with honest labor and their savings (earning
interest) is actual accumulation from effort.
   Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy both made a stab at ending the privately
created currency. Unfortunately, the experiment of having the national
currency be issued by the U.S. federal government has already been tried and
failed. The Continental Congress issued the notes to pay for the
revolutionary war, rather than to provide a service to the economy, so they
printed too many, and suffered a total loss through sudden massive inflation.
A similar disaster has happened in many other countries.
   Likewise, the worldwide invasion by multinational corporations is often
viewed by national leaders as unavoidable to achieving modernization, due
to the serious lack of job creating and big scale entrepreneurial initiative
among regular people everywhere. Even though the big companies are turning
more and more to automation, and they have often brought terrifying
pollution and cultural destruction, they are still seen as the only
realistic hope for multiple job creation and modern innovation.
   Thus the current wisdom encouraging regular people to focus on making a
kind and sane modern world using a trade economy model, looks a little
dubious. Business will either remain a game for a minority who are adept at
commerce, or a worldwide interlinked humanity will evolve into more of a
resource based society.
   The current (2011) world economy has quite a lot of people discussing a
possible total systemic failure worldwide, due to oil getting expensive and
national debt exceeding a realistic credit limit. The first two Zeitgeist
movies both describe this failure as certain and as innate to use of a
monetary system. I have a different view both ways.
   The root issue I describe as one of interest in doing clan warfare; war
engaged solely for bravado. I observe an evolution in focus that way, from
the spear throwing variety that contributed to a very sparse human
occupation of the earth for three million years, to a progressively more and
more agent style combat, with rules of conduct and formal threats that tend
towards a culture where business development is mostly secure and population
level is determined by nonviolent factors.
   Though the Hatfield/McCoy style of clan warfare is mostly unthinkable
and illegal in the developed world today, I observe a teenage boy focus on
similar expression that remains quite as enthused about the emotional
experience of senseless violence as it ever was. I also view the use of
money in a high stakes gamble as an interest in similar emotions, of
participating in causing the potential catastrophic suffering of someone
else. Thus I view the modern stock exchange as the new form of expression
for people who would otherwise be monsters is a physical sense.
   I'm the first to agree that considerable suffering and actual starvation
results from heartless money manipulation, but to me, money is like a
pipe wrench, a weapon only if in the hand of a monster. I don't see an end
to the use of pipe wrenches or money; I see an end to their use in murder.
   I also observe the worldwide trade economy getting more stable and
resilient rather than headed for a total meltdown. The idea that it is
unsustainable seems dimwitted to me. Given what I personally can do with
trivial resources, and the kind of miraculous invention that has become
normal in my lifetime, for me the panic is unwarranted. I think that the
people theorizing systemic failure are actually worried about their own
tendency to participate in the modern kind of clan warfare, and are
legitimately concerned for their personal safety in a hell of their own
making.
   
   
   
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