Yep. The love of money is indeed still the root of all evil. Jack Dorsey is proof of it. So is Kenneth Cole, Diane von Furstenberg, and Bloomberg’s Peter T. Grauer. And so are more than 170 other top executives.
They all signed the “Don’t Ban Equality” pledge, which states:
Equality in the workplace is one of the most important business issues of our time. When everyone is empowered to succeed, our companies, our communities and our economy are better for it.
Restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion, threatens the health, independence and economic stability of our employees and customers. Simply put, it goes against our values and is bad for business. It impairs our ability to build diverse and inclusive workforce pipelines, recruit top talent across the states, and protect the well-being of all the people who keep our businesses thriving day in and out.
The future of gender equality hangs in the balance, putting our families, communities, businesses and the economy at risk.
Ladies, kill the lives inside you so that you don’t have to take maternity leave, and perhaps leave companies altogether to raise families. Kill and stay. Kill and make your companies money. Kill and go shopping.
Obey. Kill.
Minds have to be far, far gone to call killing the lives inside would-be mothers “reproductive care”. Skip that.
Companies, as has long been said, want women in the “workforce” so that the pool of workers is about doubled, which drives down wages, which ensures greater profits for the bosses. This is the same reason unlimited immigration is desired.
Workers without kids, which include all or most of the LGBTQWERTY crowd, are also cheaper to hire, at the least because of reduced insurance costs and maternity leaves.
Now I was watching old people’s TV (Svengoolie) and up popped a commercial you might have seen, featuring Tom Selleck. He said how the old are growing poorer and need money. “But then there’s that six trillion”. Which apparently was the amount boomers have socked away in their houses.
The actor advised getting a “reverse mortgage”, which is in essence pre-selling your home to the bank before you die, for a price which must be less than your relatives would get, since the bank gets to take its cut due to the loan. It would be best if houses stay in families. As it is, the reverse-mortgage money will be used, to some extent, for toys, vacations, and other nonessential items.
It’s true the banks won’t keep the homes and will sell them. But the cumulative result due to the churning and needless spending means the net flow of capital is away from citizens toward the oligarchs. Meaning companies have discovered another way to get rich quick (it takes decades to build capital in a house), to the detriment of society. It also throws a weak acid on families as houses move ownership.
Usury, as everybody but everybody knows, does the same thing; moves capital from citizens to oligarchs. The rate at which this occurs varies according to value of labor. In times when labor becomes more valuable, as when innovation occurs, the pain of usury is less. When labor value flattens (at whatever level), usury inexorably drains money from the poor and feeds the rich. We had a good century or so of innovation, funded, it is true, in part by the proceeds of usury. Yet only the hopeful thinks it will last forever. And anyway, innovation only slows the rate of transfer, but it does not reduce it to zero. And the ends never justify the means.
Curiously, again, everybody knows this. Everybody at the top, that is. So why is it still allowed?
Usury was always condemned as akin to sodomy in all civilized countries. It is banned in Islam-based cultures now. Yet it is celebrated as essential in ours. Well, it is no coincidence sodomy is celebrated in the same way.
Credit cards are usurious, but also essential. You can’t fly without one, or stay in most hotels, or rent a car. Yes, they can be used in a wise way, which is to never ever never ever never use them for loans, and merely as a payment vehicle. But the people least able to do this don’t.
Talk radio is filled with ads to help people “reduce their credit card debt”. This implies a few things. The obvious is that many have debt. The less clear is that credit card issuers build into their usury a guessed-at bad debt rate. Meaning they tacitly encourage bad debt. And bad debt, like usury itself, also causes money to flow in the wrong direction.
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Abortion is murder.
The Left makes no apologies for their ritual sacrifices to Moloch.
Did you know that the Washington, DC area has by far the highest rate of missing children in the country?
By usury, do you mean all interest or only some kinds of interest? To use the word for so many claims seems like a dishonest attempt to benefit from its ambiguity. I believe you have criticized the Pope for similar things.
This is a very important post, and one of your best, Mr. Briggs. The assumption among far too many “free market conservatives” is that somehow because the free market lets people use money in usurious ways, this is all okay because of the magical free market.
Somewhere in between saying that usury takes money from the poor to the rich and asking why it is allowed, you clearly imply that this outcome, that is, the taking of money from the poor to the rich, is somehow wrong or bad, in a way which clearly outweighs all other positive outcomes, such as increased innovation. You imply that this outcome is evil in itself, meaning it would be evil even if it were caused by some less controversial practice, such as commerce. And you seem to think that it is morally evil rather than merely unfortunate, as you seem to think that a society is worse for having it even if it is otherwise better at reducing poverty than one which has less of this outcome.
I posit, until further clarification, that you have no reason for thinking this other than the excessive reading of God-damned commie bullshit.
I was considering a couple of days ago that there is NO society in which there are not billionaires. In capitalistic societies, there are probably more than in other systems. Socialist leaning, like Canada, have fewer so they think that’s “fairer”. Then there’s true socialist, where only the top layer has billionaires. In communism, the very small top has all the money and they kept it by force, generally including homicides of the actually born, not just the pre-born. There are always billionaires and millionaires and nearly every single one is just flat out evil. I used to think there was no reason why the rich couldn’t get into heaven, but Soros, Steyer, Zuckerberg, Anshutz, Bloomberg, Buffet, etc have all shown just how unlikely that is. They imagine themselves gods and stomp all over the “little people”. The fewer “little people” there are, the better, which explains their love for abortion and violent crime. I now see that the love of money is nearly 100% in the uber wealthy and hell is going to be very crowded. This has always been true. Every country was settled and shaped by the uber rich with huge plantations, railroads, range wars, etc and massive exploitation of human beings used to build and maintain the wealth of the a small number of individuals. Yes, we do get progress and a higher standard of living, but we need to remember that very evil people funded that progress in many, many cases. The evil shape the world. Sad, but true.
(Religion sadly works the same way. Religion has the uber rich and exploits the “little people” too. Money corrupts and the more you have, the more “money fever”—like gold fever—leads to selling your soul for even more.)
Tiago,
This link will do as a start:
https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/usury-faq-or-money-on-the-pill/
While the link addresses my first comment, it also gives arguments against usury which are better than the one you are giving, which is a stupid one, as I have detailed in my second comment; which just makes one wonder why you have made it in the first place if you have read that blog post.
Don’t be a usurer, Thiago.
I have not ever loaned any money, and would gladly commit never to do so at interest if given good reasons to do so. All I have received so far is your blog post, which baselessly claims that there is intrinsic evil in movement of money from the poor to the rich, and your link, which makes somewhat better arguments but which I still find to be in error.
Particularly, the error lies at what I believe to be the core of the argument, the question #15. Suppose I lend you a bike. I expect my bike in return, with some expected wear. If you misuse my bike and fall on it, however, breaking its handles or pedals, then it is just for me to expect repayment for my broken bike in order to fix it.
Similarly, when I lend you money I am also lending the opportunity to make returns with it, which is intrinsic to the money. If you use it correctly, you should make at least as much returns with it as the market allows right now through stocks or bonds, and thus be able to pay back not only the money but also the opportunity cost. If you misuse it, by leaving it in your pockets, then you will destroy the opportunity cost, while perhaps leaving the money itself intact.
Thus, the fact that I cannot retrieve my opportunity cost does not prove that it is not real, anymore than the ability to retrieve by bike’s handlebars prove that they are not real. Both were destroyed through misuse of the lent assets, and it is right to expect them back.
Or rather, “any more than the INability to retrieve by bike’s handlebars proveS that they are not real”.
Or rather, “any more than the INability to retrieve My bike’s handlebars proveS that they are not real”.
> By usury, do you mean all interest or only some kinds of interest?
The late Zippy Catholic wrote an great essay on this. Usury is any loan that (a) bears a non-zero interest rate and (b) is attached to a natural person (i.e. a full-recourse loan). No-recourse loans are not usury because the borrower may cancel the debt by returning the car, house, or whatever he offered as collateral for the loan.
Spandrell tells us that all societies become increasingly unequal over time, as some people are just better at accumulating wealth, and the poorest are handicapped by having to spend 100% or more of their income on basic necessities. Eventually some Lenin or Mao raises an army of the dispossessed and overthrows the oligarchs in a bloody civil war. The equality they impose never lasts, or Russia and China wouldn’t have oligarchs today.
Regarding the titular question, love of money does not explain why companies that make razor blades, action movies, video games, and comic books are embracing social justice and hemorrhaging customers because of it. They seem to love losing money!
A broken handle is not an opportunity cost. It is a broken handle that needs repair. In your analogy, an opportunity cost would be you lent the bike, but you could have kept it and have ridden it to the store to pick up bread. You chose to part with that opportunity. If the bike is returned in tact, are you saying the person owes you a trip to the store for bread?
My point was merely that the inability to collect something does not prove that it does not exist, since it may have been destroyed. Thus, the example in question #15 does not prove that opportunity costs are not real. If you destroy something I lent you, it must still be paid for.
Also, your example about the trip to the store is not quite right since it is unclear if I wanted bread in the first place, though I might clearly have wanted to produce value. It seems irrelevant to state it, but an apt example of opportunity cost for a bike would be the following.
If we are in a neighborhood where anyone can earn some money by working with a bike – say, as a paperboy –, it is reasonable that I expect at least as much in return for the bike as could be had by working with it, since by using the bike unproductively you have used the property improperly, destroying the opportunity cost in it – just as, by using it in another improper way, you could have destroyed its pedal, perhaps irreparably.
These stats may be a year or so out of date:
$22.4 trillion U.S. national debt
$14.9 trillion total U.S. mortgage debt
$1.03 trillion total U.S. credit card debt
$1.56 trillion in student loan debt
Mortgage debt is back by real estate. The others are backed by good faith, which is to say nothing but promises.
There are also untold $trillions in “unfunded mandates” which are mainly the retirement monies owed to public employees by the taxpayers of the future.
Here in Oregon (pop 4.26 million) the unfunded portion of the PERS debt is $26.6 billion and growing (by $4.3 billion in 2018). On average 30% of payroll costs in Oregon school districts go to folks who don’t work there any more.
Usury is medieval. The modern debt crisis is so far beyond usury that the term is a joke. You and your kids and your grandkids and your great grandkids etc will be paying staggering debts for stuff they never received. Mega klepto rapacious plundering is closer to the mark.
Thiago, opportunity cost is BS. Something that never happened is not a cost in any real way.