Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

322 DEBT
support in towns and villages. However, he soon realized that he'd unleashed
a genie that threatened to turn the whole world upside-down.
More radical reformers appeared, arguing that the poor were not morally
obliged to repay the interest on usurious loans, and proposing the
revival of Old Testament institutions like the sabbatical year. They
were followed by outright revolutionary preachers who began once
again questioning the very legitimacy of aristocratic privilege and private
property. In 1525, the year after Luther's sermon, there was a massive
uprising of peasants, miners, and poor townsfolk across Germany:
the rebels, in most cases, representing themselves as simple Christians
aiming to restore the true communism of the Gospels. Over a hundred
thousand were slaughtered. Already in 1524, Luther had a sense that
matters were spilling out of control and that he would have to choose
sides: in that text, he did so. Old Testament laws like the Sabbatical
year, he argued, are no longer binding; the Gospel merely describes
ideal behavior; humans are sinful creatures, so law is necessary; while
usury is a sin, a four to five-percent rate of interest is currently legal
under certain circumstances; and while collecting that interest is sinful,
under no circumstances is it legitimate to argue that for that reason,
borrowers have the right to break the law.26
The Swiss Protestant reformer Zwingli was even more explicit.
God, he argued, gave us the divine law: to love thy neighbor as thyself.
If we truly kept this law, humans would give freely to one another, and
private property would not exist. However, Jesus excepted, no human
being has ever been able to live up to this pure communistic standard.
Therefore, God has also given us a second, inferior, human law, to be
enforced by the civil authorities. While this inferior law cannot compel
us to act as we really ought to act ("the magistrate can force no
one to lend out what belongs to him without hope of recompense or
profit")-at least it can make us follow the lead of the apostle Paul,
who said: "Pay all men what you owe."27
Soon afterward, Calvin was to reject the blanket ban on usury
entirely, and by 1650, almost all Protestant denominations had come to
agree with his position that a reasonable rate of interest (usually five
percent) was not sinful, provided the lenders act in good conscience,
do not make lending their exclusive business, and do not exploit the
poor.28 (Catholic doctrine was slower to come around, but it did ultimately
accede by passive acquiescence.)
If one looks at how all this was justified, two things jump out. First,
Protestant thinkers all continued to make the old Medieval argument
about interesse: that "interest" is really compensation for the money
that the lender would have made had he been able to place his money