Leviticus 19:35 interestingly links justice with proper measurements and balances. “You shall do no injustice in judgment” ( lo-ta’asu ‘avel bammishpat ), the verse begins. This repeats exactly the opening of 19:15. 19:15 goes on to warn about favoritism in court: “You shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly. 19:35, after the same opening clause, turns to economic matters: “You shall do no wrong in judgment, in... Read more
Why did governments demand taxes and why did people pay? This makes sense if we think that markets pre-existed or if we think they come into being spontaneously. But David Graeber ( Debt: The First 5,000 Years ) doesn’t think that they do. Why would kings take control of mines, extract silver and gold, stamp their pictures on them, put them into circulation, and then demand them back. His answer: “This is the simplest and most efficient way to bring... Read more
Philip Goodchild ( Theology of Money (New Slant: Religion, Politics, Ontology) , pp. 6-7 ) offers this gloss on Jesus’ opposition of God and walth in Matthew 6: “God and wealth are set in competition; for time, in terms of ‘storing up treasures’; for attention, in terms of the health of the eye; and for devotion, in terms of service. Our evaluations are primarily expressed not by what we say or simply by what we do, but by how we... Read more
Graeber ( Debt: The First 5,000 Years , p. 9) offers this extreme example of the tyrannical use of debt: A French anthropologist in the eastern Himalayas in the 1970s discovered that a cast known as “vanquished ones” was in a state of “permanent debt dependency. Landless and penniless, they were obliged to solicit loans from the landlords simply to find a way to eat – not for the money, since the sums were paltry, but because poor debtors were... Read more
Here is Graeber’s explanation ( Debt: The First 5,000 Years , p. 49) of the way the British monetary system has worked since the founding of the national bank in 1694: “In 1694, a consortium of English bankers made a loan of 1,200,000 pounds to the king. In return they received a royal monopoly on the issuance of banknotes. What this meant in practice was they had the right to advance IOUs for a portion of the money the king... Read more
An offhand comment from a lawyer at a cocktail party got David Graeber thinking about debt. “One has to pay one’s debts,” the lawyer said when she found out Graeber was in favor of debt amnesty for third-world countries. Debt: The First 5,000 Years was the long answer to that question. As a preliminary answer, Graeber (p. 3) suggests that credit works only on the assumption that debts may not be paid, that the lender takes a risk in giving... Read more
In a lively meditation on money based on Daniel Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years , John Medaille challenges the standard account of the rise of money. Rather that moving from barter to money to credit, Medaille suggests that the historical evidence suggests the opposite is the case. Village life, he says, was mainly a gift economy whose currency was honor in the community: “The fisherman, when he wants a pair of shoes, does not, as in the economists’ myth,... Read more
Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang assesses the South Korean economic miracle in his Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (pp. 12-15). It is indeed miraculous. South Korea has gone from being one of the world’s poorest countries to having a per capita income comparable to that of Portugal. It used to export ore, fish, wigs of human hair, but now exports mobile phones, flat-screen TVS, and autos. The life expectancy has gone up by... Read more
My son Smith (15) has been composing music for the last few years and has recently made some of it public here: http://soundcloud.com/bigrocksbreakwindows . Encourage the young man by taking a listen. Read more
In Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (pp. 415-6), von Mises argues that there is a link between Jesus’ announcement of “God’s own reorganization” of the world and Bolshevism. Both are “utterly negative.” Jesus “rejects everything that exists without offering anything to replace it. He arrives at dissolving all existing social ties. The disciple shall not merely be indifferent to supporting himself, shall not merely refrain from work and dispossess himself of all goods, but he shall hate ‘father, and... Read more
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