Usury

I'm about to sleep so I have no time to find a lot of great examples but consider that Walt Disney started his company on a loan. without investors many ideas would have never gotten their start.

Yeah, did some pretty good stuff. Shame what Disney turned into

good luck

bump

I've never heard of anyone complaining on a moral or ethical level about charging rent to use my lodgings. Or any tool I might have. Or a vehicle. Or a book. Why is it suddenly different to charge rent for the use of my money?

>Well Aquinas had a powerful thinker who condemned usury to draw from; Aristotle.
you dont need to be Aristotle to know usury is wrong though.

That's because lodgings and tools get worn and have to be maintained.

No, but Aristotle made one of the most enduring arguments in that regard.

But money can be lost, not to mention the value of money can change because of inflation.

At the same time you cannot use it while it is lent.

for all these reasons charging "rent" on money makes just as much sense

>That's because lodgings and tools get worn and have to be maintained

So? Nobody charges rent for the maintainence. You charge for the privilege of using your property, and for any possible loss from not having it when being rented out.

Which definitely occurs with money as well as physical goods.

>Nobody charges rent for the maintainence.

Do they just get that money out of thin air, then? The landlord has obligations to maintain their property to a certain standard, and lots of renters fuck up property like you wouldn't believe.

I'm sorry, I phrased that badly.

The landlord/lender is usually charging more than just the fees for maintenance, and would be perfectly justified in doing so.

Yes, whatever costs involved in maintaining the object or property being lent will factor into the price of the lending, but ultimately, nobody say, rents a house hoping only to get as much from the lease as it would cost to maintain the property while it's let out.

not to mention safety deposits,which are withheld if the property is damaged

Okay, agreed that landlords obviously rent their land for profit and I personally don't see a problem with that, there should be some incentive and being a landlord is still (usually) work.
That said, just because you haven't heard complaints doesn't mean some people don't take issue with it. Take China's commie revolution for example - landlords were the first on Mao's chopping block. It's very easy to talk people into hating landlords based on the same principles as hating bankers and other capitalists.

>It's very easy to talk people into hating landlords based on the same principles as hating bankers and other capitalists.

That doesn't make it right, it just gets back to the real question: is it ok to make money on anything other than personal labor?

As a dirty capitalist I figure that usury, renting property etc is providing a service that people are willing to pay a premium for. When used wisely borrowing money can be ultimately beneficial for everyone involved (the lender gets a return on their investment, the borrower can utilize resources they wouldn't have access to without a loan).

That said, for reasons like OP addressed it can cause problems as well - a society where the majority are used to being in debt and willing to spend more than they can afford can make it more difficult to make a living as somebody who tries to live within their means. Debt to some extent is almost required in modern western society - to get a good job you need to pay out the ass for university, which (unless you're assisted by your parents) almost guarantees needing loans in places like the States. I think there's a lot of room for government regulation regarding usury and renting property (though in some places it's already quite heavily regulated) and that it shouldn't just be left to the 'invisible hand' so to speak.

Its just a social construct.

Traditional Confuciuan thought actually looked down on merchants and traders; the rationale was that you weren't making anything, you were just profiting off of what other people produced. Not sure if they had the same attitude towards bankers, if that even existed at the time, but I'm guessing the attitude was the same.

That sounds very based. The Chinese are bros. Usury and profiteering off others work should be looked down on.

Just dont take loans? Whats the problem?

why ezra loved him

Dumb old confucius didnt understand the importance of trade, then
A service is no less valuable than a good

If by "usury" you simply mean the lending of money to be paps back with interest, then it is what makes the modern world possible, and is the primary engine of social mobility.

Borrowing money is simply sending money from your future self to your present self, at some known loss. Lending money is the opposite. It can be either prudent or foolish, depending on the circumstances, but morality doesn't really enter into it.

>The Chinese are bros
Eeeexcept the actual Chinese are merchant as fuck.

And while they were looked down upon my the Confucian social order, many Scholar-Bureaucrats got to where they were thanks to a Merchant dad or something.

Confucianism wasn't the end-all of Chinese morality.

>Aristotle
>mfw
Clergymen HATE HIM. This French Economist destroyed Aristotle with one simple trick.

Time. Money isn't simply begetting money, interest is a rent of the use of money over time. The debtor is paying the creditor for the use of his money, as a farm hand might have rented a plough. Time is something Aristotle and the Scholastics ignored, that a man is buying the use of another man's money to use over a set period of time.

It's important to distinguish between "interest" and "usury". Money loaned at interest is a form of capital. Since the creditor forgoes the profit/utility he would have made had he invested/spent the money. The interest rate is set at a rate that exceeds the profit/utility the creditor would have otherwise derived from the money, and accounts for any risk. This argument was first made by the church in the 13th century.

At this time, interest rates were low for business (sometimes as low as 3-5%) and loans were widespread. Loans for individuals could have rates as high as 30-40% and so "usury" is often meant loaning to an individual above a certain limit, a rate of interest that is "too high" (this rate is never justified and is always a number pulled out of the air). Loaning to the poor, or to people that can't repay is often seen as "usurious".

There is no justification for banning lending at interest. The fact that OP spooks himself so absurdly, claiming that somehow "muh holy book told me that something is bad" is a good argument, shows how this topic will bring the mouth breathers out from under the floor. From Communists, to Islamic zealots, to Fascists, all of them use "feels > reals" as an argument.

Zoroastrians had (have?) a similar attitude. In the Sassanian Empire merchants belonged to the lowest caste, even below peasants, a caste that wasn't even allowed to have a Great Fire like the other three.

It looks like a lot of agrarian societies ruled by an aristocracy see merchants with contempt.

>Can we discuss the morality of usury?
I don't see anything wrong with charging interest, at least up to a certain point.

If you lend someone money, you don't have the use of that money for the duration of the loan and thus cannot use it for profitable enterprise. It's only fair that the borrower should compensate you for that. Plus, there's always a risk that the borrower will default on the loan. You have to spread this risk across multiple loans in the form of a higher interest rate in order to avoid financial disaster when someone fails to repay their loan.

correct answer