The Encyclopedia of the Catholic Church has an impimatur but it is not a teaching document of the Church. Therefore, the fact that it is positively snarky on usury really is neither here nor there.
Money was used to settle debts when a tally based on relationship would not serve. What we know as vendor financing today was perhaps, and new evidence suggests, far more widespread then than now. In a free market, people extend very local and very timely "credit," always backed by hard assets and payable upon performance (I'll pay you when I get paid).
Perhaps this was practiced far wider than we, or the Catholic Encyclopedia writers, know. Perhaps Aristotle was just commenting on a greedy and disruptive practice of demanding cash when the world revolved on private credit. And no doubt about it, deals conducted in cash excite the powers that be to take some of the proceeds, so such activity precipitates the general decline of society.
Maybe Aristotle knew better that he is given credit.
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Plato (Laws, v. 742) and Aristotle (Politics, I, x, xi) considered interest as contrary to the nature of things; Aristophanes expressed his disapproval of it, in the "Clouds" (1283 sqq.); Cato condemned it (see Cicero, "De officiis, II, xxv), comparing it to homicide, as also did Seneca (De beneficiis, VII, x) and Plutarch in his treatise against incurring debts. So much for Greek and Roman writers, who, it is true, knew little ofeconomic science. Aristotle disapproved of the money trader's profit; and the ruinous rates at which money was lent explain his severity.It condescending attributes ignorance to Aristotle, but perhaps Aristotle knew something about the world he live in not apparent to those removed by 2500 years time.
Money was used to settle debts when a tally based on relationship would not serve. What we know as vendor financing today was perhaps, and new evidence suggests, far more widespread then than now. In a free market, people extend very local and very timely "credit," always backed by hard assets and payable upon performance (I'll pay you when I get paid).
Perhaps this was practiced far wider than we, or the Catholic Encyclopedia writers, know. Perhaps Aristotle was just commenting on a greedy and disruptive practice of demanding cash when the world revolved on private credit. And no doubt about it, deals conducted in cash excite the powers that be to take some of the proceeds, so such activity precipitates the general decline of society.
Maybe Aristotle knew better that he is given credit.
Please feel free to share this post with three of your friends.
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