46. Why do We Have Credit?

Parshah Re'eh

*Important attribution note: All quotes listed in this article are credited to the Artscroll Stone Edition Chumash. Here is an Extremely Clear Citation so I don’t get in trouble: Nosson Scherman, Hersh Goldwurm, Avie Gold, & Meir Zlotowitz. (2015). The Chumash: the Torah, Haftaros and Five Megillos. Mesorah Publications, Ltd.

Deuteronomy 12:5*

“Only at the place that Hashem, your God, will choose from among all your tribes to place His Name there, shall you seek out His Presence and come there.” 

Of course, because religious observance must be controlled, right? If people were allowed to worship wherever they wanted, they’d start to adapt beliefs to better suit their lifestyles and moral codes. 

What if they decide to give up on genocide? Can’t have that. 

Decentralization is always the answer. Equip people, families, and communities with enough support to be self-sufficient, and save central control for as few things as possible. 

Deuteronomy 13:2-4*

“If there should stand up in your midst a prophet or a dreamer of a dream, and he will produce to you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes about, of which he spoke to you, saying, “Let us follow gods of others that you did not know and we shall worship them!” - do not hearken to the words of that prophet or to that dreamer of a dream.” 

Oh, so it’s okay when Abraham does it but not when anyone else does it ;) 

Deuteronomy 13: 7-10*

“If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter… will entice you secretly, saying, “Let us go and worship the gods of others”... you shall not accede to him… Rather, you shall surely kill him.” 

Always remember: the primary goal of the powerful is for us to turn against each other. 

Deuteronomy 15:1-3*

“At the end of seven years you shall institute a remission. This is the matter of the remission: Every creditor shall remit his authority over what he has lent his fellow; he shall not press his fellow or his brother, for He has proclaimed a remission for Hashem. You may press the gentile; but over what you have with your brother, you shall remit your authority.” 

The supremacist mindset is baked in: “Shaft everyone except fellow Israelites.” 

It reminds me of a phenomenon endemic to places affected by overtourism. In tourist hotspots, you now see an abundance of “tourist traps”: locations, shops, and activities that exist solely for the purpose of squeezing money out of visitors. Some cities are flirting with the idea of a tiered pricing system, one for residents and one for tourists. 

If ever there existed an activity in this world that should be purely joyful, it’s tourism, yet even tourism is being soured by the same us vs. them mentality that poisons everything else. People don’t enjoy traveling because of the sights; they enjoy it because of the people! The culture! And having literal, monetary proof that you’re being punished for choosing to spend leisure time in another place is a really hurtful experience. 

The residents of tourist hotspots obviously have a lot of reasons to be upset, but it’s not the tourists’ fault. It’s the fault of - guess who - the powerful. The city governments who refuse to cap tourist numbers, and the housing authorities who allow Airbnb to run rampant across the housing market. 

Judaism’s “remission year,” also known as the Jubilee year, was when debts were forgiven (for fellow Jews, of course, never for non-Jews.) According to some economists, this practice cooled down inflation by stopping the cycle of rentierism and interest-rate-money-printing. 

However, the root problem comes from our credit-based system. Get now, pay off later. 

If we want to banish inflation, we need to transition to a world without credit. To do that, we need to transition to a world without money. Money is a middleman and is at the root of every other middleman-type scam: insurance, investment bankers, and loan and mortgage providers.

We need goods, not money. For example, imagine a government whose primary economic function was to match people with needs to people with the skills or goods to fulfill those needs. 

Say you’re a teacher. You teach the children of a construction worker, and in exchange, that construction worker (or any other construction worker) builds your house. The traditional capitalist rebuttal is that this is too complicated a system requiring too much intervention, but that’s bullshit. 

Capitalism is SO complicated! It requires so much intervention! If we cut out the middleman, all the government would have to do is match skills with needs, plus some capacity planning to ensure the economy doesn’t consist of 50% teachers.

*Again with the Extremely Clear Citation so I don’t get in trouble: Nosson Scherman, Hersh Goldwurm, Avie Gold, & Meir Zlotowitz. (2015). The Chumash : the Torah, Haftaros and Five Megillos. Mesorah Publications, Ltd.