Halfway through Michael Hudson's: The Collapse of Antiquity
With quotes from chapter 1 and chapter 6 and YouTube links to book one and two discussions.
Halfway through Michael Hudson's: The Collapse of Antiquity
With quotes from chapter 1 and chapter 6 and YouTube links to book one and two discussions.
https://youtu.be/CmazxjNHVs4
The collapse of antiquity: I've been reading this book. It is part of what he plans as a trilogy. This is the second volume the first is Forgive Them Their Debts... Which opened my eyes to a history I had been unaware of and one that is not included in the general discussion of Western Civilization. It is discussed here.
https://www.youtube.com/live/M4DkZ3CWFOk?feature=share.
If you're unaware you should probably listen to the Forgive Them Their Debts video first. Or read the book Forgive Them Their Debts before you read Collapse of Antiquity. Here are a couple quotes from the second volume...
Michael Hudson: The Collapse of Antiquity from Chapter 1:
How interest-bearing debt was brought to Greece and italy, 8th century BC.
Economic historians used to assume that interest-bearing debt is so natural and widespread that it must have evolved spontaneously everywhere. But contrary to what was believed until quite recently, charging interest is not a spontaneous and Universal phenomenon. There is no hint of it in the linear B tablets of Mycenaean Greece or Crete ca. 1600 -1200 BC. It's absence in these Bronze Age records strongly suggest that the practice was brought to the Aegean along with other commercial innovations from Phoenicia and Syria around 800 BC, when merchants from these regions appear to have begun organizing their trade with Greece and italy, using temples as commercial embassies much like the Assyrians did a millennium earlier.
The basic economic practices of modern civilization originated in the Bronze Age near East - the fractional weights and measures that form the basis for money and credit, interest-bearing debt and contractual enterprise arrangements, along with the cultural religious awareness of the dangerous posed to society by the arrogance of wealth, and the inevitability of Nemesis- like retribution for hubris.
When Levantine traders sailed westward early in the first millennium BC, they introduced the charging of interest and related financial innovations to the Greek and Italian chieftains with whom they dealt, and who adopted these practices without the palatial checks and balances that it made depth bondage only temporary in the near East.
From 2500 to 1600 BC, Sumerian and Babylonian rulers had proclaimed Royal tax and debt amnesties to clear the backlog of agrarian arrears and other personal debts that disrupted social balance when crops failed from floods or drought, or when military campaigns disrupted the normal flow of life. Even under normal conditions, debts tend to mount up beyond the ability of debtors to pay. Near Eastern rulers recognized that if left unchecked, this accumulation of debt would force indebted subjects to fall into bondage and owe their labor to creditors to work off their debts, making debtors unavailable to provide the palace with corve'e labor for public projects or even to serve in the army. The rulers interest therefore lay in reversing undue polarization between creditors and debtors. Clean slates canceled personal agrarian debts, reversed personal debt bondage and returned self-support land to debtors who had lost it. That tradition became the Mosaic jubilee year in Judea, and Egypt's Rosetta Stone memorialized a debt amnesty. Herodotus sites examples from numerous kingdoms in the first millennium BC.
Liberating debtors in this way was not an aim of the aristocracies that emerged in the Aegean and Italy. Rather, the leading families use rural credit to obtain dependent labor, and ultimately to monopolize the land. Debt bondage became irreversible, creating popular resentment that led to civil warfare from the 7th century BC onward."
Michael Hudson the collapse of antiquity page 41. It took many centuries for modern Europe in North America to develop legal and political resistance to keep the proliferation of debt in check. But is in classical antiquity, credit or interest brought back, and today a financial oligarchy is once again stripping the economy's assets and revenue. Greece since 2015 is especially note where the inexperiencing the same debt dynamic that 2,000 years earlier plunged it and the Roman empire into widespread debt foreclosures, austerity, poor sell-off to public access at distressed prices and the flight of Labor causing depopulation.
Quote From Michael Hudson: The Collapse of Antiquity, chapter 6, public finance, from temples to oligarchs. page 134
"What began as the noblesse oblige of leading families to defray the expenses of their communities thus gave way to creditors gaining control of the state to concentrate land and other means of production in their own hands. Today's neo-oligarchic New Institutional Economics celebrates this as creating a market economy based on the security of contracts, meaning the security of creditor claims on the property of debtors, public and private. Percy Ure sites a relevant quip from Boswell. "Sir, the way to make sure of power and influence is by lending money confidentially to your neighbors at a small interest or perhaps at no interest at all, and having their bonds in your possession." The New Institutional economics endorses the expansionary path of debt financing as the bulwark of sound economic progress. But that is the dynamic that plagued entire cities and provinces by the first century BC, depleting public wealth in the same way that creditors foreclosed on the land of small holders who fell into debt... The socially destructive behavior of creditors was the problem that framed Plato's Republic (ca. 380 BC)..."
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