- Joined
- Nov 17, 2021
- Messages
- 306
- Reaction score
- 1,927
Metal coins had no "home" the way sovereign currencies did. They were freely circulating and could not be "redeemed" anywhere. Both Mefobills and Joseph Farrell underline the way that stateless merchants (Jews for Mefobills, Venetians for Farrell) cleverly used freely-circulating metal currency, falsely seen as possessing value "in itself", to speculatively pit one city-state's sovereign currency against another's. Gold and silver were alternately made artificially scarce (by hoarding) and artificially abundant in order to raise and lower the exchange rate on the real sovereign currencies issued by city-states and convertible into real wealth, allowing coin owners to subvert and capture previously self-contained economies. The crucial "problem" with metal coinage was that debts enumerated in precious metal could not be released by an act of the Temple or king since such money was intrinsically extraterritorial. This is the origin of the situation in which we find ourselves today, in which the black magick of compound interest has created an absurd predicament in which the total amount of debt on the books is far greater than the total amount of "money" on Earth, yet there is no mechanism by which the impossible, unpayable debts can be forgiven. In ancient Mesopotamia, kings would simply jubilee such debt and start over.
From an interview with economic historian Michael Hudson about his book, "The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization's Oligarchic Turning Point":
Considering the Collapse of Antiquity and the Bank Panic
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, what happened in Greece and Rome is very much like what is happening today. And there’s a common denominator in all of the Western Financial systems, debts grow by compound interest.
That is, any rate of interest has a doubling time. [Debts] sweep up steadily, and the real economy grows much more slowly, so that debts mount up without the economy being able to pay them and there’s a crash.
Well, before you had Greece and Rome, you had 3,000 years of Near Eastern civilization realizing this.
And periodically, every new ruler that would come to the throne in the Near East for thousands of years would simply wipe the slate clean of personal debts and start all over, in balance. Because they realized that if you didn’t cancel the debts, then you would have your citizens fall into bondage and would have to work for their creditors and lose their land to foreclosing creditors. All the land would end up in the hands of just a few creditors who would usually overthrow the the government and try to take over.
Well, what made Greece and Rome and all subsequent societies, down to today’s United States, so different is they didn’t cancel the debts. They left the debts in place. And instead of having a ruler, or some central authority able to stop an oligarchy from developing and taking over and monopolizing all of the money and all the land, there wasn’t any central ruler.
This is usually called democracy. But democracies for the last 2500 years have not been very good at being able to check the rise in credit or interest. And that’s why Aristotle said that many constitutions of the Greek states claim to be democratic but they were really oligarchic.
And Aristotle said, — Under democracy, creditors begin to make loans and the debtors can’t pay and the creditors get more and more money, and they end up turning a democracy into an oligarchy, and then the oligarchy makes itself hereditary, and you have an aristocracy.
And unless members of the aristocracy say, — Wait a minute, we’re bankrupting society, we’re reducing the whole society to poverty. Nobody’s going to fight for us anymore because they’re all in bondage.
Unless you have some member of the upper class or some family taking over, like Cleisthenes did in Athens in 506 BC, then you’re going to have what happened in Rome — a Dark Age.
And a Dark Age is when the creditors take over and reduce all the rest of the economy to bondage. Or today you call it “austerity” or “debt deflation”.
