Another biblical reference to debt.

In the morning, I was thinking about the currently insane economics of the world, and I thought about a biblical passage:

Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. 2 So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’

3 “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg— 4 I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’

5 “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’

6 “‘Nine hundred gallons[a] of olive oil,’ he replied.

“The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.’

7 “Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’

“‘A thousand bushels[b] of wheat,’ he replied.

“He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’

8 “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. 9 I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

The weird thing is, in our crazy world, this is a few steps away from a business model. Old debt can be repackaged into new debt. And if these sociopathic finance guys could think long term, there is a value to finding and shepherding people with good credit through the minefields. There's a weird sort of pathway that people don't explain, where you get good personal credit, then you start a company and have good company credit- hopefully, at some point you have at least enough revenue to pretend its a legit business. But in ancient, more truly capitalist terms, none of this makes sense, because debt obliterates any price signal.

In what may be serendipity, I found out that Vox addressed some of this:



Apparently, while trying to figure out how debt is distorting the economy and what was historically done with debt to relieve some of those distortions, Vox keeps getting people popping up and saying all debt relief is socialist. Socialism is a relatively new phenomenon and debt has existed for all of known history, so we can be relatively sure these are uniformed comments.