To begin with, there are bigger ramifications to a top-down central banking structure than just the employment of usury. The method of employment - the so-called interest rate cycle - especially the expansion and contraction of the money supply... is far more devastating than the rates of interest on the economy. Worse yet, the employment of banking credit as currency, floating in value, destroys the ability of corporations to store value in the money; making trade haphazard and also eating away at profits every day it takes to finish a job... the main culprit that causes poor construction and half finished projects. On top of all that, the central banking model counters cost inflation with higher interest rates... so every time someone does manage to turn a profit, the cost of money rises to eat away that profit. So there is plenty to decry about the currency without whining about usury. But if you surf the internet, you will discover a multitude of rants against usury, usually preaching that usury is an evil that can not be contained and demands payment from money that does not exist.
If you go back in time, you will discover money systems that had no usury. But you will notice that they were set in cultures that were stoically opposed to open mindedness, features of the dark ages, feudal caste systems that never allowed upward mobility for individuals born into it. The money was stable, the culture was stable, and life was good... for the rich. The industrial revolution not only plowed under the feudal system and turned up new opportunities for talented people, it also raised up fractional banking which overthrew the rigid feudal money operations of the kings and Teutonic knights. Unfortunately, the bank credit money was so destructive, it eventually overthrew the precious metals it was based upon and this led to this giant money expansion that has popped in our collective faces... with no anchor to hold back the deflation. But, most of the arguments against usury on the internet are grounded in the stable manner of money that has no usury, and the mathematical impossibility of paying interest.
What gets lost in studying the tree of usury is the forest of the currency. Usury is part of a currency that folds up when the Loan contract that formed the money is cancelled. So, the mathematical idea that usury can not be paid is like an integral based equation that describes the arc of a tossed ball; in the real world too many other factors enter in to interact with the ball and it never travels precisely the way the math says it will. Usury is pushed, pulled, destroyed, re-created, a gazillion times, so no one really knows what the amounts of interest paid add up to in our economy each year. All we can do is generalize about it's effects. Along that lines, we tend to focus on one area and look at how interest is applied and what effect it is having. Here's an article that looks at how the Fed operates, making the point that their combative use of interest is directed against Labor.
There's the anti-Semite rant that usury was against the Law for jews to charge their fellow Israelites but legal to charge against the gentiles. That is an accurate reading of the Torah, but the rant fails to take in account that Jesus was a jew and Jesus told one parable where a slothful servant in the church age was punished at the judgment seat of Christ for hiding his talent (representing his measure of the gift of the holy spirit) instead of puting it to work. Jesus concludes that the servant should have at least brought his talent to the money changes so that his master could have collected the interest. whoa! so much for Jesus being anti-usury.
My own collective thoughts on usury is that it is a tool; it can be used to build up and it can be used to tear down. The money handling in today's world charges too much interest and it has thrown our money markets into chaos. Corporate greed has done a lot of damage to world banking. Our recent housing bubble was the product of interest rates mishandled. But the bigger problem is the very foundation of the housing market is askew because mortgage notes are charging interest in excess of 100%. All of my fixes, or attempts at fixes, employ Loans with interest structures that are somehow contained to reasonable levels. Even preaching this much against usury will cause someone to scream anti-Semite! We are all going to suffer a lot of pain from stupid Loan structures until the day comes when the idiots in power in our central banks finally come to grip with the need to scale back all the interest in our banking systems. This is not a religious matter, only the ignorance of scripture and the ignorance of the history of money can allow someone to think that money is jewish or christian or muslem in nature. Attaching religious fervor to usury has halted any progress that otherwise could be made in prudent banking.... progress that might have balanced the money with the economies it regulates. It is the gross imbalance between those two that is destroying the health of our economy. Reeling in interest is one item that was left undone... and by that, I mean, restructuring interest in the many forms it takes throughout the market. Usury by itself is not the problem, but the abuse of usury has become a big problem.
Usury should be in perfect harmony with growth, and to be fair, it should lag growth. But we have Loan structures that calculate usury into the future and then apply it as if it was already accumulated... making a mockery of the word "interest" because the time has not passed that produced the interest. In other words... what we have is no longer usury, we just go on using that word, but the practices of today's market make the idea of usury obsolete. Or we have interest being charged ten times in excess of growth; either way, we have created a monster that is destroying the fabric of society and tearing down the economy. It isn't a jewish thing, it is a banking thing.... and it is the culprit behind many of the evils happening in the world at large. Our leaders have utterly failed us, they are not regulating banking, banking is regulating them, and the banks have utterly failed themselves. It is a giant cluster fuck and the ignorance of usury is one of the reasons it continues to be such a mess.
Usury is what you pay to use money. In order for that to be profitable, the use of money has to be profitable... if the use of money is not turning a profit, usury is a moot point... that's where stagflation has brought us. If we ever fix the money system and rebuild the corporate ventures around it, we will need to adjust interest structures to reasonably allign with the use of money. We need to see usury for what it is; a tool. Usury is a tool that needs to be closely monitored, once the usury charged loses a proper relationship with the return of money in a market place, someone is cheating someone. Usury should not eat up all the profit in doing business. Neither should the accumulated usury of banks, corporations, taxes, brokers, et all, add up to something ridiculously larger than a fair portion of the laborwer's yearly income. Usury demands fairness. The abuse of usury exposes greed. When a culture has so much greed and unfairness, it is bound to be devisive about usury. Usury exposes our collective sins; maybe that's why we hate talking about or adjusting usury. Unfortunately, only the folks who are abusing usury know all about it; so it is an issue that gets buried and gets attacked when you look into it. Usury is the active practice in place in the market of the moment, so it changes at the speed of light, but it is also the structure of those practices, which, amazingly, have not changed hardly at all, even though the market has changed much.
