You shall not charge interest on loans to your brother, interest on money, interest on food, interest on anything that is lent for interest.
- Deuteronomy 23:19 (ESV)
You shall not charge interest to your countrymen: interest on money, food, or anything that may be loaned at interest.
- Deuteronomy 23:19 (NASB)
Do not charge your brother interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest.
- Deuteronomy 23:19 (NIV)
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
- John Maynard Keynes
Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and parliaments. If we can get rid of the former, we may easily bear the latter.
- Benjamin Franklin
Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress.
- Francis Bacon
Money is created when banks lend it into existence. When a bank provides you with a $100,000 mortgage, it creates only the principal, which you spend and which then circulates in the economy. The bank expects you to pay back $200,000 over the next 20 years, but it doesn’t create the second $100,000 – the interest. Instead, the bank sends you out into the tough world to battle against everybody else to bring back the second $100,000.
All the banks are doing the same thing when they lend money into existence. That is why the decisions made by central banks, like the Federal Reserve in the US, are so important – increased interest costs automatically determine a larger proportion of necessary bankruptcies.
So when the bank verifies your “creditworthiness,” it is really checking whether you are capable of competing and winning against other players – able to extract the second $100,000 that was never created. And if you fail in that game, you lose your house or whatever other collateral you had to put up.
- Bernard Lietaer
The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods.
- John Maynard Keynes
Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
- Warren Buffett
It’s easier to create money than to spend it.
- Warren Buffet
While economic textbooks claim that people and corporations are competing for markets and resources, I claim that in reality they are competing for money – using markets and resources to do so. So designing new money systems really amounts to redesigning the target that orients much human effort.
Furthermore, I believe that greed and competition are not a result of immutable human temperament; I have come to the conclusion that greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using.
For example, we can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive.
- Bernard Lietaer