The Debt We Shouldn’t Pay

[ashling]

As the economic anthropologist David Graeber shows in his encyclopedic survey, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, since antiquity

the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors—of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors’ children into slavery.

He quotes the classical historian Moses Finley as saying that in the ancient world all revolutionary movements had a single program: “Cancel the debts and redistribute the land.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/09/debt-we-shouldnt-pay/

[Laelth]

1. A jubilee would be very useful to me, personally.

Might be good for the economy too.

-Laelth