Cămătăria - legală sau nu

Da nu e acelasi lucru camatar cu banca asa ca nu stiu de ce ar trebui sa fie legala camatoria.

care percep dobanzi intre 13%-25% distrug populatia, distrug economia, in schimb creeaza profituri exorbitante bancilor.

It seems that every generation has its Shylock—a despised financier blamed for the economic problems of his day. A couple of decades ago it was Michael Milken and his “junk” bonds. Today it is the mortgage bankers who, over the past few years, lent billions of dollars to home buyers—hundreds of thousands of whom are now delinquent or in default on their loans. This “sub-prime mortgage crisis” is negatively affecting the broader financial markets and the economy as a whole. The villains, we are told, are not the borrowers—who took out loans they could not afford to pay back—but the moneylenders—who either deceived the borrowers or should have known better than to make the loans in the first place. And, we are told, the way to prevent such problems in the future is to clamp down on moneylenders and their industries; thus, investigations, criminal prosecutions, and heavier regulations on bankers are in order.

Of course, government policy for decades has been to encourage lenders to provide mortgage loans to lower-income families, and when mortgage brokers have refused to make such loans, they have been accused of “discrimination.” But now that many borrowers are in a bind, politicians are seeking to lash and leash the lenders.

This treatment of moneylenders is unjust but not new. For millennia they have been the primary scapegoats for practically every economic problem. They have been derided by philosophers and condemned to hell by religious authorities; their property has been confiscated to compensate their “victims”; they have been humiliated, framed, jailed, and butchered. From Jewish pogroms where the main purpose was to destroy the records of debt, to the vilification of the House of Rothschild, to the jailing of American financiers—moneylenders have been targets of philosophers, theologians, journalists, economists, playwrights, legislators, and the masses.


Major thinkers throughout history—Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes, to name just a few—considered moneylending, at least under certain conditions, to be a major vice. Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and modern and popular novelists depict moneylenders as villains. Today, anti-globalization demonstrators carry signs that read “abolish usury” or “abolish interest.” Although these protestors are typically leftists—opponents of capitalism and anything associated with it—their contempt for moneylending is shared by others, including radical Christians and Muslims who regard charging interest on loans as a violation of God’s law and thus as immoral.


Moneylending has been and is condemned by practically everyone. But what exactly is being condemned here? What is moneylending or usury? And what are its consequences?


Usury enables levels of life-serving commerce and industry that otherwise would be impossible. Consider a few historical examples. Moneylenders funded grain shipments in ancient Athens and the first trade between the Christians in Europe and the Saracens of the East. They backed the new merchants of Italy and, later, of Holland and England. They supported Spain’s exploration of the New World, and funded gold and silver mining operations. They made possible the successful colonization of America. They fueled the Industrial Revolution, supplying the necessary capital to the new entrepreneurs in England, the United States, and Europe. And, in the late 20th century, moneylenders provided billions of dollars to finance the computer, telecommunications, and biotechnology industries.

By taking risks and investing their capital in what they thought would make them the most money, moneylenders and other financiers made possible whole industries—such as those of steel, railroads, automobiles, air travel, air conditioning, and medical devices. Without capital, often provided through usury, such life-enhancing industries would not exist—and homeownership would be impossible to all but the wealthiest people.

Moneylending is the lifeblood of industrial-technological society. When the practice and its practitioners are condemned, they are condemned for furthering and enhancing man’s life on earth.


Given moneylenders’ enormous contribution to human well-being, why have they been so loathed throughout history, and why do they continue to be distrusted and mistreated today? What explains the universal hostility toward one of humanity’s greatest benefactors? And what is required to replace this hostility with the gratitude that is the moneylenders’ moral due?


As we have seen, hostility toward usury stems from two interrelated sources: certain economic views and certain ethical views. Economically, from the beginning of Western thought, usury was regarded as unproductive—as the taking of something for nothing. Ethically, the practice was condemned as immoral—as unjust, exploitative, against biblical law, selfish. The history of usury is a history of confusions, discoveries, and evasions concerning the economic and moral status of the practice. Until usury is recognized as both economically productive and ethically praiseworthy—as both practical and moral—moneylenders will continue to be condemned as villains rather than heralded as the heroes they in fact are.


___
Yaron Brook: “Money-Lending: Its History and Philosophy,” lecture delivered at Second Renaissance Conferences, Anaheim, California, July 2001.

It is time to set the record straight.

Although serious economists today uniformly recognize the economic benefits of charging interest or usury on loans, they rarely, if ever, attempt a philosophical or moral defense of this position. Today's economists either reject philosophy completely or adopt the moral-practical split, accepting the notion that although usury is practical, it is either immoral or, at best, amoral.

Modern philosophers, for the most part, have no interest in the topic at all, partly because it requires them to deal with reality, and partly because they believe self-interest, capitalism, and everything they entail, to be evil. Today's philosophers, almost to a man, accept self-sacrifice as the standard of morality and physical labor as the source of wealth. Thus, to the extent that they refer to moneylending at all, they consider it unquestionably unjust, and positions to the contrary unworthy of debate.

Whereas Aristotle united productiveness with morality and thereby condemned usury as immoral based on his mistaken belief that the practice is unproductive and whereas everyone since Aristotle (including contemporary economists and philosophers) has severed productiveness from morality and condemned usury on biblical or altruistic grounds as immoral (or at best amoral)?what is needed is a view that again unifies productiveness and morality, but that also sees usury as productive, and morality as the means to practical success on earth. What is needed is the economic knowledge of the last millennium combined with a new moral theory one that upholds the morality of self-interest and thus the virtue of personal profit.

Let us first condense the key economic points; then we will turn to a brief indication of the morality of self-interest.

The crucial economic knowledge necessary to a proper defense of usury includes an understanding of why lenders charge interest on money?and why they would do so even in a risk-free, noninflationary environment. Lenders charge interest because their money has alternative uses?uses they temporarily forego by lending the money to borrowers. When a lender lends money, he is thereby unable to use that money toward some benefit or profit for himself. Had he not lent it, he could have spent it on consumer goods that he would have enjoyed, or he could have invested it in alternative moneymaking ventures. And the longer the term of the loan, the longer the lender must postpone his alternative use of the money. Thus interest is charged because the lender views the loan as a better, more profitable use of his money over the period of the loan than any of his alternative uses of the same funds over the same time; he estimates that, given the interest charged, the benefit to him is greater from making the loan than from any other use of his capital.

A lender tries to calculate in advance the likelihood or unlikelihood that he will be repaid all his capital plus the interest. The less convinced he is that a loan will be repaid, the higher the interest rate he will charge. Higher rates enable lenders to profit for their willingness to take greater risks. The practice of charging interest is therefore an expression of the human ability to project the future, to plan, to analyze, to calculate risk, and to act in the face of uncertainty. In a word, it is an expression of man's ability to reason. The better a lender's thinking, the more money he will make.


Another economic principle that is essential to a proper defense of usury is recognition of the fact that moneylending is productive. This fact was made increasingly clear over the centuries, and today it is incontrovertible. By choosing to whom he will lend money, the moneylender determines which projects he will help bring into existence and which individuals he will provide with opportunities to improve the quality of their lives and his. Thus, lenders make themselves money by rewarding people for the virtues of innovation, productiveness, personal responsibility, and entrepreneurial talent; and they withhold their sanction, thus minimizing their losses, from people who exhibit signs of stagnation, laziness, irresponsibility, and inefficiency. The lender, in seeking profit, does not consider the well-being of society or of the borrower. Rather, he assesses his alternatives, evaluates the risk, and seeks the greatest return on his investment.

And, of course, lent money is not "barren"; it is fruitful: (asta fiind si motivul tiparirii banilor din nimic!!) It enables borrowers to improve their lives or produce new goods or services. Nor is moneylending a zero-sum game: Both the borrower and the lender benefit from the exchange (as ultimately does everyone involved in the economy). The lender makes a profit, and the borrower gets to use capital whether for consumption or investment purposes that he otherwise would not be able to use.


An understanding of these and other economic principles is necessary to defend the practice of usury. But such an understanding is not sufficient to defend the practice. From the brief history we have recounted, it is evident that all commentators on usury from the beginning of time have known that those who charge interest are self-interested, that the very nature of their activity is motivated by personal profit. Thus, in order to defend moneylenders, their institutions, and the kind of world they make possible, one must be armed with a moral code that recognizes rational self-interest and therefore the pursuit of profit as moral, and that consequently regards productivity as a virtue and upholds man?s right to his property and to his time.

There is such a morality: It is Ayn Rand's Objectivist ethics, or rational egoism, and it is the missing link in the defense of usury (and capitalism in general).

According to rational egoism, man?s life?the life of each individual man?is the standard of moral value, and his reasoning mind is his basic means of living. Being moral, on this view, consists in thinking and producing the values on which one's life and happiness depend while leaving others free to think and act on their own judgment for their own sake. The Objectivist ethics holds that people should act rationally, in their own long-term best interest; that each person is the proper beneficiary of his own actions; that each person has a moral right to keep, use, and dispose of the product of his efforts; and that each individual is capable of thinking for himself, of producing values, and of deciding whether, with whom, and on what terms he will trade. It is a morality of self-interest, individual rights, and personal responsibility. And it is grounded in the fundamental fact of human nature: the fact that man's basic means of living is his ability to reason.

Ayn Rand identified the principle that the greatest productive, life-serving power on earth is not human muscle but the human mind. Consequently, she regarded profit-seeking the use of the mind to identify, produce, and trade life-serving values?as the essence of being moral.

Ayn Rand's Objectivist ethics is essential to the defense of moneylending. It provides the moral foundation without which economic arguments in defense of usury cannot prevail. It demonstrates why moneylending is supremely moral.

The Objectivist ethics frees moneylenders from the shackles of Dante?s inferno, enables them to brush off Shakespeare?s ridicule, and empowers them to take an irrefutable moral stand against persecution and regulation by the state. The day that this moral code becomes widely embraced will be the day that moneylenders and every other producer of value will be completely free to charge whatever rates their customers will pay and to reap the rewards righteously and proudly.

If this moral ideal were made a political reality, then, for the first time in history, moneylenders, bankers, and their institutions would be legally permitted and morally encouraged to work to their fullest potential, making profits by providing the lifeblood of capital to our economy. Given what these heroes have achieved while scorned and shackled, it is hard to imagine what their productive achievements would be if they were revered and freed.

__________
Wall Street Journal, August 2, 2007, p. A4.
von Böhm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest, book II.
?In Defense of Financial Markets,? -Ayn Rand Bookstore.
Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton, 1991); and Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957)
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library 1966).

It seems that every generation has its Shylock—a despised financier blamed for the economic problems of his day. A couple of decades ago it was Michael Milken and his “junk” bonds. Today it is the mortgage bankers who ... blablablabla....

Shylock tells Antonio to prepare, and at that very moment Portia points out a flaw in the contract. The bond only allows Shylock to remove the flesh, not blood, of Antonio. If Shylock were to shed any drop of Antonio's blood in doing so, his "lands and goods" will be forfeited under Venetian laws.

Revin cu intrebarea initiala:

Cat ar trebui sa fie dobanda, cat e "Moral"?

It is a morality of self-interest, individual rights, and personal responsibility. And it is grounded in the fundamental fact of human nature: the fact that man's basic means of living is his ability to reason.

Ayn Rand identified the principle that the greatest productive, life-serving power on earth is not human muscle but the human mind. Consequently, she regarded profit-seeking the use of the mind to identify, produce, and trade life-serving values as the essence of being moral.

Daca esti pragmatic atunci poate ar trebui sa citesti ce ziceam de Ayn Rand's Objectivist Ethics, putin mai sus.

Nu uita ca exact astfel de "camatari" au dus omenirea inainte

Tu te contrazici singur: spui ca marile imperii au fost facute prin jaf insa ii condamni pe "evreii" care mareau nejustificat dobanda.

Pe de alta parte, cine stabileste ce trebuie sa fac eu cu banii mei? Statul? Un matematician care spune ca mai mult de 9% e "periculos"? (desi inflatia poate fi de 20% - si fii atent, nu ascunsa in diferitele moduri de calcul ca acum).

Te rog nu compara Rusia (care e cu 200 de ani in urma si acum) cu alte tari ce chiar au lasat ceva in istoria omenirii. E aproape o jignire ce faci tu.

Nu cred...dacă Inflația e de 2 cifre? 10%...15%... .

rsumy