I just finished reading a paper online by Brian McCall on usury and the damage it is doing to the modern economy (see http://works.bepress.com/brian_mccall/6/ ).

This is a dense paper to get through, but it’s worth it.  Using St. Thomas Aquinas and the history of usury from ancient times onward, McCall presents a thorough explanation of a subject that we ignore at our peril.  Usury has always been condemned by the Catholic Church – as well as by Jews and Muslims.  One of the most despicable villains in all of Shakespeare’s plays is a usurer – Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice”.  Usury was a notorious crime in the Middle Ages, as obvious a crime against nature to the pre-moderns as was sodomy or abortion.

But these days we don’t believe in nature or in crimes against nature – despite all our praise for Mother Earth.  We certainly don’t believe we’re a part of nature or that we have a nature or that we can sin against this nature.

So we’ve lost sight of the sin of usury.  And with good reason – it is the fuel of our (now collapsing) economy.

McCall points out that there are objections to usury from two points of view. . From the point of view of distributive justice usury is a sin because it victimizes the poor – to wit, payday loan sharks and credit card companies.  From the point of view of commutative justice, however, we see the true nature of usury and how it is in fact a sin against nature.

To illustrate this, imagine a poor starving man who comes to a rich man and begs to be fed a ham sandwich.  The rich man says, “I will not give you a ham sandwich, but I will lend you one.  This is a loan.  You must pay me back.”  The poor man promises to.

A month later, when the poor man has saved enough to buy a ham sandwich to replace the one he ate, he brings said sandwich to the rich man.  “This will not do!” the rich man says.  “You owe me 30 sandwiches, not just one.”

“But you only lent me one,” the poor man replies.

“Yes, but you ate that sandwich 30 days ago, and I have been without it myself for 30 days.  I could have eaten it 30 times over in 30 days.  You not only enjoyed my sandwich, you enjoyed the use of it, for a full month!”

“The use I put the sandwich to was to eat it.  And after I ate it once, I could not eat it again 30 times over.  And neither could you!  The sandwich vanished upon being put to use – which is to say eaten,” the poor fool replies.

But the rich man, flying in the face of nature and common sense, claims that somehow a thing that is consumed in its use is no different from the ongoing use of a thing that endures, as if the ham sandwich had been a plow the poor man had borrowed, a durable good he had been putting to productive use for that length of time.  And so the poor man is either clapped in jail, or in an enlightened society, asked to make the minimum payment of a half slice of ham every month for the rest of his life.

This crime against nature, of trying to gain from something that produces no gain, of charging for the use of something separate from the consumption of it, when its use is in fact that very consumption – this is usury.

And this greedy neglect of reality, this demand for profit where no good is produced, this fee for use even when something is used up, this is the root of what is bringing the world’s economy down.

As someone once said, “We want our money to breed, but our sex to be sterile.”  And the effect of that fallacy is all around us.