Saturday, April 2, 2016

Capitalism is Usury-ism.

Read the following from Fr. Heinrich Pesch, S.J.'s Ethics and the National Economy.

Fr. Pesch was the first Catholic to write a comprehensive history of economics, and his student was the anti-usury expert Fr. Bernard W. Dempsey, S.J., author of Interest & Usury, which the famous economist Schumpeter prefaced, mentioning that Duhem's historical researches in physics are akin to Fr. Dempsey's in economics.

"Communism has failed, and now that Capitalism has shown us in the intervening years that it is even more ruthless than the communists imagined, we need an alternative to both Marx and the Manchester School. Heinrich Pesch is that alternative, and Rupert Ederer [the translator] is his prophet.”
—E. Michael Jones, Ph.D.
Editor, Culture Wars; author, The Slaughter of the Cities
Fr. Pesch, S.J., wrote: "Capitalism is the dominion over the national economy by the acquisitive interests of those who own capital."

p. 85-6:
    Usury is not exclusively a monetary phenomenon having to do with money-lending. A disparity between what is offered and what is given in return, resulting in excessive gain, can arise anywhere in the exchange process, and especially in business transactions.
    Usury in a business transaction is the contractual appropriation of obvious surplus value in the process of buying and selling. The damage is done by the contract itself where performance and remuneration are juxtaposed. …
and, in the chapter "Capitalism & Socialism" (p. 159):
Capitalists are usurers in the broadest sense of the word. We understand usury in the same sense as Franz Schaub does, as any contractual expropriation of what is clearly surplus value. So, in our time, we use the word capitalism to mean a social system where usury operates with more or less complete freedom. The concept, capitalism, signifies a quest for gain that is totally uninhibited. Capitalism, therefore, means economic dominion by capitalists…
Pesch is also a Thomist, mentioning St. Thomas frequently in this work.

Hilaire Belloc, although some of his writings are Liberal, describes usury well in his chapter on usury in Economics for Helen; cf. Fr. Slater's description of usury in his A Manual of Moral Theology for English-Speaking Countries p. 321. Belloc and Fr. Slater eloquently explain that usury leads to economic disparities and imbalances. Belloc essentially expounds on St. Thomas's definition of usury as selling what does not exist. Although Belloc's description of usury was interesting, it seems Calvinist. Calvin was the first to say that interest can be charged on productive loans. Catholics before Calvin considered any "buying and selling of time" usurious.

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