"For centuries, debt and indebtedness have had profoundly destabilizing effects on human societies. In the ancient world, rulers and their subjects had a solution: known as a debt jubilee, it involved a periodic, unconditional wiping out of debt. We need such a jubilee today."
I can't quite get over the idea that debt jubilees seemed to be a common thing thousands of years ago. According to Michael Hudson forgiving debt was stopped as common practice in western world or rather its predecessors Roman society and since then Oligarchies have been allowed to form meaning the rich get richer and the poor get poorer because the rich can make loans and the poor often cant pay them back.
Bitcoin would solve perhaps half the problems because money would retain its value over time and in fact become more valuable. Would this mean that less people would fail to pay back their debt and hence bring more people to the 'rich category'? There would still be some that failed I suppose but whatever you earned, if you saved it you could still live a decent life. There would still be poor people but there would be a lot less poor people. It wouldn't be the catastrophic and polarizing issue that it is now.
Michael goes on to say....
"In Rome, the wrong kings were overthrown in about 509 BC by an oligarchy, who essentially wanted to reduce the rest of the Roman population to serfdom. The whole Republic was a long set of one revolt after another after another, wanting a debt cancellation and redistribution of land. All of this was called a democracy. A democracy to the oligarchy means all the creditors are equal, and therefore liberty is the liberty to enslave the rest of the population.
Democracy throughout antiquity meant serfdom for most of the population. Aristotle was very clear on this. He said, “Many cities have constitutions that appear to be democracies, but they’re really oligarchies.” And in fact, every democracy, Aristotle wrote, tends to turn into an oligarchy, as wealthy people get rich, and then the oligarchy makes itself into a hereditary aristocracy, and lords it over the rest of society.
You had this whole background that led to the modern world, which had stopped the tradition of debt cancellation that had liberated populations from debt bondage, and what became serfdom. And it was on the idea that the law is inexorable.
The historians now say, “Well, boy, the Roman Empire wasn’t all that bad — look at how rich it got.” But the richness was all concentrated in the 1 percent of the population and the 99 percent ended up being tied down to the land. If you read the late books of the New Testament, all the way through to the book of Revelation, it’s all about, “We’re living in the end times, it’s terrible, Rome is the beast, there’s no hope here. We can’t reform land. We can’t cancel the debts ever because of the greed of the rich. There’s nothing to do but become martyrs and die and hope that in the next world, things are going to be better, and maybe Jesus is going to come back.” The whole idea was anti-Roman.
Every economy is going to be planned by someone. The question is, is it going to be planned by the creditors, as it has happened today? Or are you going to have a government, a ruler, that is going to say, “My job is to keep society stable, and to prevent it from polarizing so that we can survive and be resilient and go forward?” The creditors don’t care about resilience. Their time frame is rather short."
#debt #finance #bitcoin #jubilee #jesus #rome #history #philosophy #aristotle #grownostr #important #freedom #serf