What Ezra didn't know.

[brendan831]

Last night I had a phone conversation with a friend about some fundamental economic concepts. One of them was interest or, to use an outdated and somewhat pejorative term, "usury". I've suspected, for a while now, that when many classical thinkers condemned "usury" they were reacting not to interest per se, but to the results of a bundle of

Comments

stage three profit, except when stage 2=0

[salimondo]

Happy to see this work toward what we could call a MEST analysis of what money "wants."

The "prestige" part of this particular magic trick -- stage two -- is that we jumped from the baron as equity partner in a limited venture over the part where he invents the promissory note. The spice trade generates wealth that we all share in. The note harnesses [ob+ligare] time differently and generates its own armature of nine & eighty derivatives & refinements, many of which are stupid in a given set-up but none of which are inherently haram to the discerning.

The note at interest, for example, creates its own system of obligations to a "future" and the bounds of the system of value in that hypothetical scenario. Is the universe a steady state system or expanding? One might call this a magical link of sorts

Multi-classing

[brendan831]

Thank you. It is, indeed, his show to do as he will - so long as his stars are favorable. Karma, however, is a....

heaven & earth are not humane; they regard the ten thousand [basis points] as straw dogs

[salimondo]

True, the law of karma is arguably that bad money -- the baron's paper -- drives out good, but gold is nearly impossible to kill. So he can earn his comeuppance even in a fantasy medieval setting unencumbered by the latest & greatest innovations.

Why do the wahabis hate compound interest and the West adores it? Is there something essential at stake here and if so, who's right?

Law speakers

[brendan831]

I don't think anyone would argue that the basic laws of physics, like gravity, aren't based on something essentially true about the world. They might be subject to revision, but there's something real going on "under the hood". We can overcome them by calling greater laws to our aid (those that govern the mechanics of flight), but we can only ignore them at our own peril

divine mercury

[salimondo]

With all respect to our M. Benoist, he lost me at "the word 'interest' means making income from money."

Surely anyone grounded in Indo-European philology knows that the magic root of the word inter+esse goes much deeper than this tautological formulation.

Her bastard children are what we call time and attention.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ1mf5g-Pco

The care structure of Being.

[brendan831]

Yeah, me too.

"At the most basic level of being-in-the-world, Heidegger notes that there is always a mood, a mood that "assails us" in our unreflecting devotion to the world. A mood comes neither from the "outside" nor from the "inside," but arises from being-in-the-world."- Thus spake Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology)

Well said, and thanks for the music!

struggle for pleasure

[salimondo]

Also sprach indeed! He can get a little uncanny, Mertens, but he's actually one of the deeper canto heads out there ... all the more remarkable because he's not a native English speaker. And the girls on the DVD don't hurt.

The in-between -- the lurker within, parasite or assimilate -- can be pernicious. However, M. Benoist snipped the really salient lines:

[usura] stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom

This "palsy" is the stutter that filled Athens with the lust for moon-children and decimalised the pound, the splinter of mirror-ice in Kai's eye, the inflationary spiral down into the infinitesmal that obsessed Gygax & Guenon alike.

Money making money is just the shadow of the real pharmako/logical poison that

between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls.To sew it up more thoroughly & send it home to die: But where hermes is at the table, the way out of the desert is through the dessert & vice versa. 358 = 358, but to know the

The Black Ram

[brendan831]

No, they don't hurt one bit do they?

You make a good point. Life depends on so many errors. Who can say what illusions and lies will be necessary tomorrow, and what truths we will have to forget, in order to create.

"...in the desire for knowledge there is avarice and conquest; in the artist there reappears the repressed power to dissimulate and lie; the drives are transformed into demons whom one fights, etc."
-Will to Power 2:317