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6-10 Ethics & Social Responsibility [CH 6

which will give them all new life, if only they will be themselves, obedient, at its
disposal. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites; if man does not work,
he ought not to eat. Everyone is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every
one’s work is to produce something good: there is to be no showing off, no putting on
airs, rather do your part—that is noble. There is nobility in honest work.

The Command to Work, Interest Rates and Bondage
There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient Greeks, and by the Jews in the
Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the
modern economic system probably has completely disobeyed. All these people told us
not to lend money at interest; and lending money at interest—what we call
investment—is the basis of our entire economic system. Now it may not absolutely
follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the
Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or ‘usury’ as they called it), they did not
foresee the joint stock company, and were only thinking of the private money-lender,
and that we therefore need not bother about what they said. We will not decide that
question here. That is to say, we all want our wealth to grow, and in those days the
land owner raising cattle which increased each spring season with offspring saw that
his wealth grew as his herds grew. In our modern economies, we lend money for any
number of business ventures and spend money, using credit cards, for personal
consumption such as purchasing food and clothing. The reality is that borrowing
money creates debt, and the payment of debt requires an interest rate, and when that
interest rate and the amount of interest builds to an extremely heavy burden, then the
borrower becomes the bond servant of the lender—the borrower becomes enslaved.
A business venture has the reward of producing a product that consumers
purchase, and the differences between cost of production and gross revenue indicate
wealth growth. Financing the raw materials for production at a reasonable interest rate
and for a short period of time is one of the tools for wealth creation. Borrowing, on a
credit card to purchase personal clothing, appliances, or entertainment is not wealth
creation, but facilitates our personal tastes that are forever changing, creating a burden
that when not paid off in full, causes the borrower to become a bond servant—
enslaved. Modern credit cards have interest rates that vary from 1.5% per month to
2.4% per month, or 18% to 29% per year, all of which are usury and enslaves the credit
card debtor. Isn’t the card holder responsible for his decisions and his state of
economic slavery, even with usurious interest rates allowed by law, and protected in

law by your legislators? It would be disingenuous to have not stated that three great
civilizations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on
which we have based our current economies and our whole lives.
One more point on this topic that the Judeo-Christian foundation mandates is that
everyone must work, they must be productive, and giving reasons that ‘they must earn
the bread they eat,’ and ‘in order that he may have something to give to those in need’.
Charity—giving to the poor—is an essential part of morality. In the frightening
parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31-46) it seems to be the point on

which everything turns. Some people nowadays say that charity should be unnecessary
and that instead of giving to the poor we should be producing a society in which there
are no poor that need charity. President Lyndon B. Johnson (D) introduced his “war on
poverty” legislation for congress to consider, and it did pass in 1964. Johnson stated,
“Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to
prevent it”. Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’ continues today, as a national entitlement, via
taxation of the people, and the current cost of this ‘war’ is in excess of $25 trillion,
with the result (an observable fact you can look up for yourself) that poverty in the
United States has not been eliminated, but rather actually increased in the nation so
that there exist more people in poverty today than in 1964 on a per capita basis. It

appears that the nation has lost that “war” and continues to finance it. The fundamental
cause being that government stepped into what the individual should and must do for
themselves. Further, many government agencies have evolved to compete with
functioning charitable organizations and those government agencies are less effective
than the charities they compete with.

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