>>Of course, I'm not imagining plantation is a paradise. But anything that creates value by borrowing it, i.e. charges interest or just invents money which doesn't exist... is theft. Whenever I hear "leverage", I remember a grafitto from back home:
>>
>>"Give me a lever, and I will move
>>your kidneys"
>
>How is charging a markup on selling an item any different than charging interest on a loan. That's pretty much how supply and demand works. You have something I want, you charge me more for that something than it cost you to produce, whether it's a loan or a chair. Doesn't that mean that all profit is money which doesn't exist?
>
>I expect you know more about it than I do, but I assume your wife doesn't only charge for her costs for the items she sells, but actually invents money that doesn't exist and calls it profit. No?

There's added value, coming from work, ideas, time invested into the product. There's very little of that in a loan; since most of it is just paperwork, how can a percentage measure that work, when the work is the same for a $2000 and $200000 loan?

For the loan, they charge you interesting money. Very interesting, because they don't claim it's an added value - it's the reimbursement for the value they would have got had they invested it somewhere else. Well, why didn't they?

The economy is not an exact science. Its only axiom is the same as for other humanities: people will behave. Now if everyone is trained to believe that interest is a must, and that belief takes the firmness of the law of gravity, then it becomes a law by force of belief. And maybe, for lack of effort to think of something better, some of the interest is the price of the bankers' service (the rest goes for CEO's {s}bonuses{/s} {s}boni{/s} goods, tearing older buildings and building new regional HQs in their place, advertising and paying extra to the guys who invent new scams. Like that idea that "interest is charged first", which makes an annual interest calculus much more interesting, because the more often you pay, the more interest you pay so you're punished, but then if you don't pay as often, they punish you like a child.

The largest scam of all is, of course, leverage. They are borrowing money they don't have. They have borrowing money they have borrowed elsewhere - and everybody in the chain is charging interest. Everyone makes at least {s}a quarter of a perce{/s} one quarter of one percent in the process... but the first guys in the chain, the Fed, are not just printing money, i.e. borrowing to the government the money that didn't exist a minute ago, they are borrowing it at an interest. Sounds like the guy who was forging $13 bills - $10 being the nominal value, plus 30% profit.

And this interest on the newly imagined money is already larger, annually, than the whole federal tax collected. Which is fine by me, it's all imaginary anyway. As long as grocery takes that imaginary money, I'm willing to be paid in it. Just don't expect me to love the banks.