Usury Crisis Archives
March 17, 2015
Zippy Catholic on Usury
Our old friend Zippy Catholic has devoted assiduous labor to the study of usury. His great patriotic service to the Republic is opening this field of understanding.
Reading it, my mind goes instinctively to one of my favorite quotations from Chesterton: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
This Chestertonian epigram has the great virtue, among other things, of stating the direct truth on usury in modern high finance. Many decades and even centuries of economic arrangements have found difficult, and left untried, the Christian teaching on how, in full charity to fellow men, we might profitably lend out our capital.
Great historically-minded writing can often have the peculiar accents of a kind of integral detective novel. Zippy’s treatise on usury, now helpfully available as a free ebook, exudes this character.
Our friend has discovered a bloody crime, a heinous murder, treachery and folly and the human arts bent on malice and wrong.
The veteran of many ugly crime scenes, he has arrived, like a saturnine private dick as adapted from a Raymond Chandler story, at the scene of another one: the assassination of Christian ethics on debt finance.
Like any real detective, Zippy’s work is painstaking and meticulous, more than it is flashy and energetic. It’s the hard labor of following the assassin’s clues, discovering his conspiracy, in order to expose his wickedness and vindicate his victim.
The ebook is written as an accessible FAQ. It can all be read in one sitting (though more sittings will be needed if, like me, you desire a sustainable understanding).
A real thing has been assassinated. More precisely: sound doctrine has been exiled. The teaching on usury across the centuries has been dishonorably driven from public discourse. Christianity is not, in fact, wholly silent on how we should structure our capital markets.
I hope I do not blunder into oversimplification by attempting the summary that follows.