Plato, a philosopher in Classical Greece, talks about the transition from oligarchy to democracy to usury and debt:
"When money is lent on a contract to receive not only the principal sum again, but also an increase by way of compensation for the use, the increase is called interest by those who think it lawful, and usury by those who do not." [310]
"Besides such necessary ecclesiastical affairs, there would be also in the political estate innumerable matters of great importance to improve. There is the disagreement between the princes and the states; usury and avarice have burst in like a flood, and have become lawful [are defended with a show of right]; wantonness, lewdness, extravagance in dress, gluttony, gambling, idle display, with all kinds of bad habits and wickedness, insubordination of subjects, of domestics and laborers of every trade, also the exactions . . . " [311]
"A certain great usurer ... did hire preachers to preach against usury that all other being by the terrible threatenings of God's word stayed from that abominable sin, he alone might occupy usury..." [John Veron, A Strong Defence , 1562]
"The cancer of usury is an old venomous sore and the chiefest head and cause of rebellions in countries."
"A fiat monetary system allows power and influence to fall into the hands of those who control the creation of new money, and to those who get to use the money or credit early in its circulation. The insidious and eventual cost falls on unidentified victims who are usually oblivious to the cause of their plight. This system of legalized plunder (though not constitutional) allows one group to benefit at the expense of another. An actual transfer of wealth goes from the poor and the middle class to those in privileged financial positions." [312]
Plato, a philosopher in Classical Greece, talks about the transition from oligarchy to democracy to usury and debt:
"The rulers, being aware that their power rests upon their wealth, refuse to curtail by law the extravagance of the spendthrift youth because they gain by their ruin; they take interest from them and buy up their estates and thus increase their own wealth and importance...The men of business, stooping as they walk and pretending not even to see those whom they have already ruined, insert their sting - that is, their money - into some one else who is not on his guard against them, and recover the parent sum many times over multiplied into a family of children: and so they make drone and pauper to abound in the State" [Plato. The Republic. (VIII, 555)]
"Scientists have developed a powerful new weapon that destroys people but leaves buildings standing - it's called the 17% interest rate."
"All that we had borrowed up to 1985 was around $5 billion, and we have paid about $16 billion; yet we are still being told that we owe about $28 billion. That $28 billion came about because of the injustice in the foreign creditors' interest rates. If you ask me what is the worst thing in the world, I will say it is compound interest." [318]
"The debt trap that snapped shut in 1980 was set in 1974, when OPEC was induced to trade its oil only in U.S. dollars. The price of oil then suddenly quadrupled, and countries with insufficient dollars for their oil needs had to borrow them from international lenders. By 2001, enough money had flowed back to First World banks from Third World debtors to pay the principal due on their original loans six times over; but interest had consumed so much of those payments that the total debt had actually quadrupled." [313]
"It is this debt scheme, with its lethal weapon of interest compounded annually, that has allowed a small clique of financiers to dominate the business of the world." [314]
"In the 1930s, faced with problems of sovereign and other debt similar to those of today, the pretence that debts could be repaid was maintained for far too long." [315]
"Usury overthrows trade, decays merchandise, undoes tillage, destroys craftsmen, defaces chivalries, beats down nobility, brings dearth and famine, and causes destruction and confusion." [316]