View Single Post
 
Old 02-26-2009, 07:29 PM
jetgraphics
 
Location: Prepperland
18,927 posts, read 14,115,131 times
Reputation: 16638
Default USURY tidbits

Quote:
Originally Posted by BigJon3475 View Post
Usury (pronounced /ˈjuːʒəri/, comes from the Medieval Latin usuria, "interest" or "excessive interest", from the Latin usura "interest") originally meant the charging of interest on loans.
USURY tidbits

http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sac...07-19/news.asp
"Usury is defined as the act or practice of lending money for interest above the legal or socially acceptable rate. The term seems archaic and mostly irrelevant in the deregulated, free-market world of payday loans. And it is even harder to fathom that for most of its history, the word referred to the practice of charging any interest in excess of the principal amount of a loan.

Historians trace the practice of usury back approximately 3,500 years, and for the vast majority of that time, it has been repeatedly condemned, scorned and prohibited for moral, ethical, religious and economic reasons. Since well before biblical times, lending money for profit has been essentially forbidden by the tenets of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. "
- - -
In 1543, the Estates General of the Habsburg Netherlands – while still Catholic, but under Protestant(Lutheran, Calvinist) influences, enacted a statute to legitimize interest payments up to 12%: anything above that was considered to be usury.

In 1545, just two years later, Henry VIII had his Parliament enact a similar statute to legitimize interest up to 10%: similarly, anything above that was considered to be usury.

In 1552, Parliament, at the behest of the government of Henry's son Edward VI, revoked this statute (even though this government was Protestant).

But in 1571, Queen Elizabeth I had Parliament restore her father's statute in full.

The interest rate ceilings were subsequently lowered:
to 8% in 1623;
to 6% in 1660;
and to 5% in 1711
staying at that rate until the abolition of usury laws in 1854

While other Protestant countries legalized interest, the usury ban continued to be enforced in most other Catholic countries up to the French Revolution.

---

How the Church has lifted bans laid down by Bible - Times Online
"The Aristotelian view of money as a "barren" means of exchange was developed by Aquinas and not liberalised for centuries. The Roman Catholic Church opposed usury, as did Luther and other Protestant reformers, with the exception of Calvin.

"Civil law broke away from canon law on this issue in England in 1571 and moderate interest could be charged."
[Isn't that interesting? For 1,571 years, usury was evil. Suddenly secular law said it wasn't.]

---
http://www.monetary.org/usurytalk (broken link)
"CALVIN'S REFORMATION- John Calvin finished off the usury ban in 1536...."
---
re: Catholic Church
Economics in the Catholic World - The Acton Institute
"....In the period between the two World Wars, the old ban on usury, officially lifted only in 1918..."
For the Roman Catholic Church, usury was banned for 1,918 years.

-------

http://www.monetary.org/usurytalk (broken link)
"Aristotle (384-322 BC) Formulated the Classical View against usury. Aristotle understood that money is sterile; it doesn't beget more money the way cows beget more cows. He knew that "Money exists not by nature but by law":

" The most hated sort (of wealth getting) and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest (tokos), which means the birth of money from money is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural." (1258b, POLITICS)

" ...those who ply sordid trades, pimps and all such people, and those who lend small sums at high rates. For all these take more than they ought, and from the wrong sources. What is common to them is evidently a sordid love of gain..." (1122a, ETHICS)
[Note: I find myself in agreement with Aristotle, on the nature of money being a dead thing, not capable of "natural increase". And it is fitting that he lumps usurers with pimps and other sordid scoundrels. The image of the bank president in his pimp-mobile is quite fitting.]

---
Usury, Scriptural Economics and Eschatological Time
" St. Antoninus, the Archbishop of Florence (at his time — 1440 — the banking capital of Europe) remarks how usury was a mortal sin of an especially odious kind.

"...usury ever breaks and consumes the bones of the poor, day and night, on feasts and feriae, sleeping or waking it works and never ceases."

"the Tabula exemplorum, a thirteenth-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale of Paris, attests: "Every man stops working on holidays, but the oxen of usury (boves usurarii) work unceasingly and thus offend God and all the saints; and since usury is an endless sin, it should in like manner be endlessly punished."

"...the vice of usury, unlike many other sins, tends to last into old age and entangles the sinner up to the hour of his death principally because usury is a peculiarly difficult sin to repent; for its forgiveness demands restitution of the profits, an act which seems too hard to a prosperous usurer."
[NOTE: Repentance requires restitution.]
---

I have omitted anti-usury references from the Koran, because it is a well known fact that all Islamic nations categorically forbid usury. Suffice to say, the Muslims are not paranoid when they fear attacks by the Usurer dominated "Fee World".
Reply With Quote

All times are GMT -6. The time now is 08:15 AM.

© 2005-2024, Advameg, Inc. · Please obey Forum Rules · Terms of Use and Privacy Policy · Bug Bounty

City-Data.com - Contact Us - Archive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 - Top