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Tuesday, October 21, 2008

the eternal life of money?

Change of topic for a while. I read this today in Christopher Wright's excellent book The Mission of God. He quotes Geiko Muller-Fahrenholz at length (Jubilee Challenge, pp. 104-111). I thought it was timely given the financial instability of the past few weeks:
We enjoy time, we are carried along in the flow of time, everything is embedded in its time, sot the very idea of exploiting the flow of time to take interest on money lent seemed preposterous. It does so no more because the sacredness of time has disappeared, even before the sacredness of the land vanished from the memories of our modern societies. Instead capitalist market economies have been elevated to global importance'; they are enshrined with the qualities of omnipotence that border on idolatry. So the question arises: does it make sense to attribute to money qualities that no created thing can ever have, namely eternal growth? Every tree must die, every house must one day crumble, every human being must perish. Why should immaterial goods such as capital - and it's counterpart, debts - not also have their time? The capital knows no natural barriers to its growth. There is no jubilees to put an end to its accumulative power. And so there is no jubilee to put an end to debts and slavery. Money that feeds on money, with no productive or social obligation, represents a vast flood that threatens even large national economies and drowns small countries...But at the heart of this deregulation is the undisputed concept of the eternal life of money.

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