In this video, I talk with author and economic analyst John Sneisen about defining usury, something we at WAM haven't done a video on for quite a few years.
We decided to break down the basics, the good, the bad and the historically ugly events related to usury.
You see, under the private contract, voluntary usury isn't a bad thing. If individuals want to get a loan and the person giving them the loan wants to charge interest, there's nothing wrong with that. If the person knowingly puts the other person into debt, that's terrible, but does not justify the state enforcing rule on them. Both parties agreed to a certain contractual agreement.
Now, in the case of usury within the fiat system, it's absolutely terrible and wrong. For legal tender laws to enforce the debt unto the populace through their fractional reserve lending madness, or even zero reserve policy, people have no choice but to be indebted by the practice. Usury is used by the banking system daily and without willing participants it leads to a lot of serious problems obviously.
John also goes into the historical implications and the bottom line for the topic of usury. We figured we would do a longer video on the subject matter after our previous video on the topic back in January 2016 when our presentation wasn't as good for obvious reasons.