Labor Is the Source of All Value, While Usury Is a Sin Enslaving People
Banks aren't your frens
I’m not an econ guy.
When I first became interested in reading history and politics I realized that a lot of the truth was going to hinge on understanding economics. And that scared me.
There are two basic problems for me with grasping economics: first, the fact that the academic literature dealing with it is predominantly propaganda spun up by the victors in wars (both shooting wars and wars waged through economic or political/psychological warfare).
And second, the fact that I am also just not very good at understanding even the basic realities. We all have our gaps and weaknesses and for me, economics is one of mine (one of many).
The book “Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind” by Stephen Mitford Goodson helped me address both problems. It's well enough written that even I was able to understand much about the basic problem with usury and how the history of humanity has nearly always been fraught by it.
And it addresses the propaganda problem by refuting the central premise of all modern academic economics (not to mention that of most academia and sadly most ordinary people and politicians): the idea that man is essentially an economic creature, mainly concerned with how to get his bread and build his house.
This on its face should already strike you as a deeply wrong statement.
When I was a kid during the Bill Clinton administration, there was this slogan his presidential campaign team made famous: “It’s the economy stupid.” They were saying that people are mostly concerned about money and that helping voters prosper was the way to their hearts.
But what Jesus said is pretty different. From Matthew 6:31-34.
It’s not primarily food and clothes and shelter people should be concerned with, but rather with their condition in terms of being the obedient creatures of God.
Well if personal religion is not primarily about food and clothes, neither should public policy be primarily about that. And Jesus never says that caring about money is bad—indeed, in the same passage above, He emphasizes that God certainly knows we need all these things.
It’s about priority.
A Christian (and by extension a Christian society) make the kingdom of God the priority. When we put God’s kingdom first, He adds the blessings of His providence to us in dispensing material blessings.
Politicians and economists and bankers and multinational corporations actually get it backwards. They prioritize money and the material conditions of life while either demoting—or more likely burying—any interest in life’s spiritual conditions.
Labor Is the Source of All Value
The fact that we are to seek God in prayer and through worship and Bible study certainly does not diminish the vital need for Christians to work.
In fact, concluding that since God is love (which is a biblical statement needing exegesis) means that “all you need is love” and that we no longer need to work is just as destructive to society as the other thing—I mean undermining society through a shallow materialism that reduces people to cogs in an economic machine.
We do work. We work and we pray (and we pray and we work). The two activities are distinct, but not ultimately separable.
The point here is that contrary to usury and, frankly, the ideology of naked finance capitalism, labor (work, movement, the creation of goods or services) is the source of all value.
Who said that?
Well many people said it. One was Karl Marx. But that doesn’t make it any less true.
Because other people who said it include Adam Smith, who is often held up as the godfather of capitalism.
We can’t use shallow caricatures or “that man is bad” type arguments to assess the truth of this proposal.
It’s either true or false.
Thankfully, the Bible speaks into the matter. Among other places, Paul wrote in 2 Thessalonians 3:10-12—
In this passage, the Holy Spirit shows us how spiritual needs are woven together with material ones, and that the neglect of the one will (or should) be linked up with the deprivation of the other.
Let me ask you a question.
Is there anyone in our society who is eating a whole lot more than he is working? I’m sure we have all been guilty of such a sinful and wicked imbalance at times. But some are eating way more than others, while working way less than others.
I’m thinking of the busybodies of the world.
God calls such imbalances “disorderly” and that some who live this way are “not working at all, but are busybodies.”
This is George Soros.
He’s one of the busiest bodies in the busybody business.
He used finance capital (enslaving people into debt as a banker) to become a billionaire. He borrowed money himself, and used that money to loan out to people in financial distress, at interest, and used those interest payments to enrich himself as he climbed the ladder in the banking world.
He might have worked hard at one point in the past (which I doubt) but he’s not doing anything useful today.
Not only does he not work, but he takes advantage of his vast wealth to travel all over the world meddling in the affairs of every country on earth.
He uses his evil Satanic organization, The Open Society Foundation, and his ill-gotten wealth to fund all kinds of evil political movements in America and Europe. He funds and builds abortion clinics, campaigns for abortion and for the liberalizing of gay rights laws in these countries. He made enormous contributions through the years to many US states’ attorney general races in order to guarantee the election of extremely liberal attorneys to facilitate violent crime in America, which he frames as a strategy to promote social justice.
So he’s exactly what Paul talks about in 2 Thessalonians. He’s a busybody who refuses to work, who sees man (including himself) as primarily economic. He frames questions of justice, not as if they flowed from eternal and spiritual realities emanating from the mind of God (which they do), but as if they were primarily a question of how big a slice of pie each man deserves.
He’s a remarkably wicked person, understanding neither the word of God nor its power. He’s an imbecile wasting his treasure on foolish and empty schemes which are doing incalculable harm in the countries where they are perpetrated.
Labor is the source of all value. Not interest.
You cannot take advantage of your brother’s financial trouble to enrich yourself. That is absolutely wicked.
The only way to get out of this debt slavery, where people end up working their whole lives without ever having any ability to live with dignity or build wealth or own a home, is by once again prohibiting usury.
There are laws and formulas to prove that there is a mathematical limit to how long compound interest can grow on a loan before it becomes un-pay-back-able. That is why God not only forbade usury but also instituted the jubilee where all the un-pay-back-able loans would be relinquished and the original properties redeemed to their original owners.
It is not reasonable for a small percentage of humanity to own all, or even most, of the land and resources on earth. While the Bible does NOT place a numerical definition on any concept of a Christian living wage or “40 acres and a mule” it certainly teaches that the laborer is worthy of his wages and that “it is not right to muzzle the ox while he treads out the grain.”
This article needs some memes, let me go back and add some.
