Interest: Why it's necessary...and good.

No matter your faith, or lack thereof, you really need to read Ann's latest missive, posted in full below.  Oppressives, go find a Conservative to explain the big words to you...I'm pretty sure your Bitter Wymmynz Studies degree didn't cover any of this.

Jesus Rejects ZIRP. It's In The Bible.

Posted by Ann Barnhardt - February 14, AD 2012 9:02 PM MST

ZIRP stands for "Zero Interest Rate Policy." There is a lot of misunderstanding out in the world about the charging of interest. The nutball anti-Semites would have you believe that ALL banking and finance is an immoral activity and construct of the JOOOOOOZ. Those people are also stupid, and many of them are genuinely psychiatrically ill. Have I ever mentioned how much insanity and evil lands in my email box? Yeah. Quite a bit. Thanks be to God that He made me the steely, obdurate battle-ax that I am, so that I can laugh at that garbage rather than get all squishy and sensitive about it.
 
Super-fun rockband church is too busy drooling on its shirt and watching the flashing lights to even consider such non-canine-level concepts.
 
The distinction that needs to be made here is between interest and usury. Usury, in the modern sense of the word, is the charging of obscenely high interest rates, and is often directed at those who are desperate - so not only is usury screwing people, it is screwing people who are, for whatever reason, exceptionally vulnerable. Yeah. That's evil. However, in the ancient origins of the word, “usury” referred to any interest, even fair interest rates. Keep that in mind for later.
 
The charging of interest is NOT evil or sinful. In fact, interest is utterly essential to a healthy, moral economy. Here's the deal. Money is the device that men use to give value to their capacity to produce - whether that production be the production of a clean toilet in a Burger King by getting down on one's knees and scrubbing the thing with a brush, or the production of a new life-saving drug or revolutionary device. From toilet scrubbing to cars or laptops, it is all production of a good, borne from human drive, energy, action and reason. Further, money is an inherently hopeful and socially unitive thing. Money requires that men trust in each other, and hope in each other's goodness and honesty not just in the present, but also into the future.
 
Why do you think the evil satanic Marxists who have now taken over this country are doing everything they can to debase and destroy the currency? Because they want to utterly destroy social cohesion. They want to literally break our spirits. They want to break us of any independent drive to action or productivity. They want to sap us of all of our creative energy. They want us to stop trusting in each other. Why? So that THEY will be the only thing anyone can turn to. THEY want to be the SOURCE of production, and thus THEY will be in control of all wages, earnings and, ultimately, all wealth. They want all creative energy to serve one end: THEM and THEIR PERSONAL WEALTH. They want everyone sniping and mistrustful of everyone else so that while we are busy fighting with each other we won't notice that THEY are raping us mercilessly and unceasingly. They want us to stop hoping and just give up.
 
I'm just paraphrasing Francisco d'Anconia's speech on money from "Atlas Shrugged." Here is a link to the excerpt. READ IT. And spare me the emails claiming that to quote Rand is to deny Christ. Yes, she was an atheist, but don’t you think that God is powerful enough to reveal Himself through atheists, too? If you don’t believe that is possible, then you need to give up pretty much everything in your life that has any origin in any mathematics or physics discoveries of the last 100+ years. Including all medical imaging and computers. To start. Don’t be obtuse.
 
Now back to interest rates. Now that we know what money actually is, namely an exchangeable, fungible representation of man's capacity to create and produce, we can easily understand what the TIME VALUE OF MONEY is.
 
If you are going to let someone else use your money for a period of time, you will, by definition, NOT get to use that money yourself. Thus, you are giving up something very real in loaning your money out, and you need to be reasonably compensated for what you are giving up. This is the TIME VALUE OF MONEY, or "interest".
 
Let's take some of my cattlemen clients. They know how to generate a consistent return on their money by trading cattle. For the sake of simplicity, let's call that rate of return 10% per year (my yound Jedi Padawan in Nebraska who has seen a triple-digit return over the last year is laughing his Jedi keister off right now). If they would loan their money to a bank in the form of a certificate of deposit, they would be losing a fortune. Why? Because the bank would only pay 1% on a one-year CD, and my guys could make 10%. They would be squandering the TIME VALUE of their money.
 
So, what ZIRP, or zero interest rate policy, which is what the evil Federal Reserve has done since 2008, is to effectively declare that our money is worthless – completely independent of the whole gold standard/fiat currency argument. That isn’t even what we’re talking about here. Money has no time value. Think about that. Your human capacity to produce has no time value. Loan someone all of the money that you earned working for the last year. Let them use that money for a year. When it is time to pay it back, you will get exactly what you started with back, MINUS ONE YEAR OF YOUR LIFE and all of the productivity and innovation that could have happened in that year. This is intentional. The objective of ZIRP is NOT to stimulate the economy. The objective of ZIRP is to grind the economy to a halt so that there is no private investment or entrepreneurship - only fascistic government raping of the public coffers and exponentially increasing public dependence on the government. Hello? What do you think all of this solar panel bee-ess is about? Do you think that has ANYTHING to do with energy production or "global warming?" Give me a break. It is looting – pure, unadulterated LOOTING.

What has been the byproduct of ZIRP coupled with the intense debasement of the currency itself via quantitative easing? INFLATING commodity prices with simultaneously DEFLATING wages. It’s a perfect storm – exactly what they want. News broke this week that gasoline, and really ALL energy consumption is tanking. We are using far less gas than we were four years ago, and yet prices are climbing. Why? Because we have given up. The time value of our money is zero according to the government, will stay at zero for years to come according to the government, and thus people have just . . . stopped. Why do anything now if what I do isn’t really worth anything? Why strive to produce when I know that the fruits of my production will generate no significant return if invested? In fact, why do anything if the only thing I can be sure of is that if I have any degree of success with my investments, I will be taxed and regulated back into breaking even at best and failing at worst? ZIRP essentially says: IT’S NOT WORTH IT. JUST SIT ON THE COUCH. IT'S THE SAME DIFFERENCE IN THE END.  

Meanwhile, capital is flowing into physical commodities in order to provide a hedge against the inflation that is the inevitable consequence of printing trillions and trillions of dollars AND as a speculative investment vehicle for those people who are looking for any sort of reasonable return on their money over time, which they CAN’T get in the conventional money market. Thus, we have the price of gas going up while demand is tanking. The same goes for my market: beef. Why do you think the price of beef is skyrocketing? Do you think it is because people are beating down the doors at Morton’s of Chicago and other steakhouses? Hardly. Food prices are inflating while wages tank for exactly the same reasons outlined above.
 
Eventually, the government and the financial system will collapse. When that happens and the Federal Reserve is no longer able to synthetically hold interest rates at zero and people look around and realize that our money is worthless smoke and mirrors, the rubber band will snap and we will see the dollar finally die via hyperinflation like that seen in Weimar Germany. I heard a story about Weimar Germany last week that I have to share. A man had a wheelbarrow filled with cash that he took to the market. He stepped into a storefront to purchase something and left the wheelbarrow filled with cash just outside the door because it wouldn’t fit inside. He wasn’t inside but for a few seconds. When he stepped back out, the money was all lying on the ground – but the wheelbarrow was gone. True story. Think about that.
 
Now to the Jesus bit, and you financial people don’t bug out, because this is really quite interesting. Go to Matthew 25:14-30 and read the Parable of the Talents. A “talent” is a currency unit, FYI. In a nutshell, Jesus tells of three servants who are entrusted by their master with a sum of money. The first goes out, invests his five talents, and is able to return the principle plus five more – a 100% return on investment. The second likewise generates a 100% ROI in the two talents he was given. The third merely buried the one talent he was given and returned the principle with zero interest. Now listen to the words of Christ speaking to the third servant. It’s amazing:

Wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sow not, and gather where I have not strewed: Thou oughtest therefore to have committed my money to the bankers, and at my coming I should have received my own with usury. Take ye away therefore the talent from him, and give it to him that hath ten talents. For to every one that hath shall be given, and he shall abound: but from him that hath not, that also which he seemeth to have shall be taken away. And the unprofitable servant cast ye out into the exterior darkness. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Dude. Now, what were you saying about the abolition of all interest? Here is where all of the idiot Marxist theologians will wail and moan and say that this passage is a metaphor for the spiritual gifts we have been given AND NOTHING MORE. Uh, wrong.
 
Of course it is a metaphor, that is the point of PARABLES, to convey deeper meaning using everyday examples. But here is the point that so many pridefully, and moronically, miss:
 
Our Lord would never, ever use an evil activity in order to illustrate a virtuous activity. He would never use a lie to illustrate TRUTH. If all usury (in the ancient sense of any charging and paying of interest) was truly evil, He would not, He COULD NOT use that evil activity as a metaphor for a virtue. Do you see this? Do you understand? If you’re fighting this obvious, glaring truth, then the reality is most likely that you are so completely consumed with anti-Semitism, and are so personally invested in Jew-hatred and blaming the Jews, via the banking industry, for EVERYTHING that you are literally mentally impaired by that hate, because this is stark black and white truth. Are there bad Jews? Of course. But there are bad Christians, too. Like . . . Jon Corzine, who is ethnically Christian. As is Hank Paulson. As is Timmy Geithner. As is Paul Volcker. Oh, we’re ALL responsible for this mess. Every one of us who have sat by and let it get this out of control. Every one of us who have gleefully leveraged ourselves into this debt, every one of us who have consumed the bread-and-circuses “entertainment”, every one of us who have sat passively while 56,000,000 children were slaughtered and said not a word, and obediently paid our taxes. Oh, yes, the guilt is most assuredly collective, so spare me your anti-Semitic filth.
 
Couple the glaring scriptural evidence with the Randian explanation of the essence of money, and how money is directly tied to the dignity of the individual human being, and finally cross-reference both of these points to the obvious damage that ZIRP is doing to the global economy, and there you have it. Jesus rejects ZIRP. It’s in the Bible.

You've just been logic-bombed.  Let now the rebuilding of your thought processes commence.