To Have Is to Owe

Due Payment

The battle between the rich and the poor has primarily taken the form of disputes between creditors and debtors for thousands of years. These disputes have involved debates about the morality of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, sequestering sheep, seizing vineyards, and selling debtors' children into slavery, among other issues. Conversely, during the previous 5,000 years, public uprisings have started in the same way, remarkably consistently: with the ceremonial destruction of debt records, including ledgers, tablets, and papyri, in whatever format they may have existed at any given period and location. During the most recent economic crisis, when the fundamental foundations of capitalism were collapsing, surveys revealed that the vast majority of Americans believed that the nation's banks shouldn't was historical.

It has been determined by those tasked with regulating political discourse in our legislatures and media that there is no need for another such adjustment at this time. Without making any changes, the US government merely applied a three trillion dollar band-aid to the issue. While mortgage holders were largely left to the mercy of the courts and subject to a bankruptcy law that, the year before, Congress had made significantly more severe against debtors, financiers were "bailed out with taxpayer money"—that is, their fake money was treated as if it were real. There has also been a pushback against small-scale debtors, spearheaded by financial institutions that are now depending on the same government that provided them with bailouts to use the full weight of the law against common people in financial distress. difficulty. "Having debt is not a crime," the Minneapolis Star-Tribune states. "However, individuals are frequently imprisoned for not making debt payments." According to Minnesota, "with 845 cases in 2009, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years." Some courts imprison debtors in Illinois and southwest Indiana for failing to make court-ordered debt payments. In severe circumstances, inmates are detained until a minimum payment is made. A judge in January of 2010 condemned a guy from Kenney, Illinois, "to indefinite incarceration" unless he produced $300 to settle a debt he owed a lumber yard.[2]

Even with all of this, we barely understand what debt is. The concept's inherent flexibility is what gives it power and causes moral ambiguity. connected to it. When one looks at the global debt history, one discovers that most people have had the contradictory views that lending money is a bad habit and that repaying debt is just an issue of morality. The former seems to have taken precedence over the latter as of late because we are unwilling to examine our blind loyalty to creditors. However, if dismantling the welfare state is necessary to supposedly pay off our debts, we ought to consider who we owe those debts to specifically. And where did the money that was lent to us end up? With our creditors? (The response, naturally, is that we owe the financial organizations we recently bailed out for making foolish and fraudulent loans; they didn't ineffable, that paying one’s debt is not the essence of morality, that borrowing and lending are human arrangements, and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things differently.

The fact that great imperial kingdoms have consistently opposed this sort of politics since Hammurabi is noteworthy. The paradigm was set by Athens and Rome, who insisted on enacting laws to mitigate the effects of ongoing debt crises while also outlawing obvious abuses like debt slavery and using the spoils of empire to lavish various extra benefits on their poorer citizens, who served as the army's generals and kept them afloat. All of this was done in a manner that unchangeable, that loan and borrowing are human constructs, that paying off debt is not the ultimate measure of morality, and that democracy is essentially the capacity for consensus among participants to arrive at alternative arrangements.

It is noteworthy that major imperial states have consistently opposed this sort of politics since Hammurabi. Athens and Rome set the precedent: even in the face of ongoing debt crises, they insisted on passing laws to mitigate the effects; they outlawed blatant abuses like debt slavery and used the spoils of empire to lavish various extra benefits on their less fortunate citizens, who served as the backbone of their armies, in order to maintain their standard of living. The way they handled everything was so as to repel any objection to the debt concept itself. The United States has adopted a strikingly similar strategy: it has abolished the worst abuses (such as debtors' prisons), used the spoils of empire to finance obvious and covert subsidies, and most recently, it has manipulated exchange rates to drive inexpensive Chinese goods into the US. The idea that everyone must pay their debts has always been a sacrosanct precept upheld by the ruling class. It has lately come to light that this principle is blatantly false. It turns out that none of us is required to pay back our loans. Not all of us do.

2400 BCE in Mesopotamia

By 2400 BCE usury was an established practice. Peasants received loans from officials or merchants, and if they couldn't repay them, they started to Their belongings are taken, beginning with furniture, goats, and grain and progressing to farms and homes before family members. The servants went first, then the wives, kids, and even the borrower himself, who was left as a debt peon until the money was paid back. This was a threat to split society apart since, in the event of a poor harvest, a sizable segment of the peasantry would become enslaved by debt. Farmers with debts gave up on their fields out of dread of being repossessed.

Sumerian and Babylonian kings occasionally declared broad amnesties, fearing total social breakdown. All outstanding land was returned to its rightful owners, debt peons were given back to their families, and all outstanding consumer debt was declared void (business obligations remained unaffected). Prior to For a long time, when they came to power, monarchs would declare these kinds of amnesties. (The sovereign was in a good position to absolve himself of all prior moral commitments, as he saw himself as actually reconstructing human society.) These were known as declarations of liberation in Sumerian. Since this is what emancipated debt peons were permitted to do, the Sumerian word amargi, which literally means "return to mother," is the earliest recorded use of the word "freedom" in any language.

The Legendary Barter Country

Debt is almost always mentioned when the origins of money is discussed by economists. Barter takes precedence over money, and credit develops later. What one typically finds, even when reading works on the history of money in, say, France, India, or China, is a narrative of coins, with hardly any mention whatsoever of credit agreements. Anthropologists such as myself have been pointing out the obvious flaws in this picture for almost a century. Long before there was cash, there was a credit system, tabs, and even expense accounts. These items date back to the dawn of humanity. History frequently swings between bullion-dominated eras, when people believed that gold and silver were equivalent to money, and periods when people believed that money was an abstraction, a virtual unit of account. The conventional account of this history bears little resemblance to the actual economic activities that take place in actual communities and marketplaces, where the majority of people are probably in debt to one another in a variety of ways.

A portion of it simply stems from the evidence itself: While credit arrangements are typically not preserved in the archaeological record, coins are. However, the issue is more complex. For economists, credit and debt have always been somewhat of a scandal since it is nearly hard to pretend that people who lend and borrow money are doing so for simply "economic" reasons (that is, that lending money to a stranger is the same as lending money to one's cousin, for example). Consequently, they start the money story in a fictional universe where credit and debt have completely vanished: There was barter in the past. It was challenging. Thus, money was created by humans. Next followed the growth of credit and banking. The inevitable, logical advancement of mankind Common sense has evolved from Mastodon tusk barters in the Stone Age to sophisticated financial instrument wielders.

The discovery of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian documents, which came after Adam Smith, who believed that economic history started with Homer, has led us to believe that credit systems, or virtual money as it is currently known, existed thousands of years before coinage. In reality, money was invented by bureaucrats to distribute and track state resources in an uneven manner; credit systems were never fully replaced by money. Conversely, barter is essentially an unintentional consequence of using coins or paper money; it provides a haven for those conducting business in cash economies where currency has become unusable for whatever reason. However, almost all current introductory economics textbooks follow this similar methodology: "To observe the ways in which a medium of In Economics (2005), Begg, Fischer, and Dornbuch write, "Imagine a barter economy instead of exchange." Maunder, Myers, Wall, and Miller wrote in Economics Explained, "Imagine the difficulty you would have today if you had to exchange your labor for the fruits of someone else's labor" (1991). Writers Parkin and King state, "Imagine you have roosters, but you want roses," in Economics (1995). In Economics (2000), Stiglitz and Driffill wrote, "One can imagine an old-style farmer bartering with the blacksmith, the tailor, the grocer, and the doctor in his small town."

Everyone who publishes an economics textbook feels compelled to tell us the same story, and there's a simple explanation for it. It is, in a way, the most significant story ever told for economists. It was by stating it that Adam Smith, a moral philosophy professor at the University of Edinburgh, essentially founded the field of economics in 1776. He rejected the idea that money originated with the government and maintained that markets, property, and currency existed before political institutions and served as the cornerstone of human civilization. This meant that if the government was going to get involved in financial matters, it should only do so in order to ensure the stability of the currency. He could only assert that economics, as opposed to, say, politics or ethics, was a separate field of human study with its own set of rules and principles by putting up such an argument. According to his definition, the economy follows the principles of It is where we engage in our innate tendency to trade and barter; it is a place apart from moral and political life. We have been and always will be hauling and bartering. Simply put, money is the most effective means.

Economists have been looking for the mythical country of barter for decades. The lack of authenticity in Smith's story, which is set in Aboriginal North America, is a reflection of the scarcity of trustworthy data about Native American economic systems available in Scottish libraries. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Lewis Henry Morgan's accounts of the Six Nations of the Iroquois had been widely read and published; they demonstrated that the Iroquois accumulated their goods in longhouses, which were subsequently distributed by women's councils, and that no one had ever exchanged arrowheads for anything else. thick portions of beef. Economists disregarded this data. For instance, Stanley Jevons penned The Principles of Political Economy, his seminal investigation into the beginnings of money, in 1871. He used examples of Indians trading venison for elk and beaver hides directly from Smith. In anticipation of discovering the land of barter, missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators were dispersed over the globe at the same period, many of them with copies of Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Never did any of them. They found an almost infinite diversity of economic structures. However, no one has been able to find a location where neighbors engage in regular economic transactions in the manner of "I'll give you twenty chickens for that cow."[3]

1990s Madagascar

I had the honor of speaking with a Kalanoro, a small, spectral animal that a local spirit worker claimed to have stashed away in a chest in his home, in Arivonimamo, Madagascar. The ghost belonged to Nordine, a terrible woman who was the brother of a well-known loan shark. Since this was an ancient creature, I was a little hesitant to interact with the family, but several of my companions persisted. From behind a screen, the monster spoke in a strange, alien quaver. However, money was the only topic it was truly interested in discussing. At last, feeling a little annoyed by the entire act, I questioned, "What did you use for money back in the old days, when you were still alive?"

"We didn't use money," was the prompt response. We used to directly barter goods for one another in the past.

IOU Everyone

What authorized the first nation-states to impose taxes? These days, everyone believes they understand the response to this query. Our taxes fund the government's ability to serve us, starting with military defense. Though no one is fully sure when or by whom the arrangement was established, or why we should be bound by the decisions of distant ancestors on this particular issue when we aren't by their judgments elsewhere, the arrangement is thought to have its roots in an original social compact.

"We didn't use money," was the prompt response. We used to directly barter goods for one another in the past.

IOU Everyone

What authorized the first nation-states to impose taxes? These days, everyone believes they understand the response to this query. Our taxes fund the government's ability to serve us, starting with military defense. Though no one is fully sure when or by whom the arrangement was established, or why we should be bound by the decisions of distant ancestors on this particular issue when we aren't by their judgments elsewhere, the arrangement is thought to have its roots in an original social compact.

"We didn't use money," was the prompt response. We used to directly barter goods for one another in the past.

IOU Everyone

What authorized the first nation-states to impose taxes? These days, everyone believes they understand the response to this query. Our taxes fund the government's ability to serve us, starting with military defense. Though no one is fully sure when or by whom the arrangement was established, or why we should be bound by the decisions of distant ancestors on this particular issue when we aren't by their judgments elsewhere, the arrangement is thought to have its roots in an original social compact.