Peter J. Leithart

Why did governments demand taxes and why did people pay? This makes sense if we think that markets pre-existed or if we think they come into being spontaneously. But David Graeber ( Debt: The First 5,000 Years ) doesn’t think that they do. Why would kings take control of mines, extract silver . . . . Continue Reading »

Philip Goodchild ( Theology of Money (New Slant: Religion, Politics, Ontology) , pp. 6-7 ) offers this gloss on Jesus’ opposition of God and walth in Matthew 6: “God and wealth are set in competition; for time, in terms of ‘storing up treasures’; for attention, in terms of . . . . Continue Reading »

Graeber ( Debt: The First 5,000 Years , p. 9) offers this extreme example of the tyrannical use of debt: A French anthropologist in the eastern Himalayas in the 1970s discovered that a cast known as “vanquished ones” was in a state of “permanent debt dependency. Landless and . . . . Continue Reading »

Here is Graeber’s explanation ( Debt: The First 5,000 Years , p. 49) of the way the British monetary system has worked since the founding of the national bank in 1694: “In 1694, a consortium of English bankers made a loan of 1,200,000 pounds to the king. In return they received a royal . . . . Continue Reading »

An offhand comment from a lawyer at a cocktail party got David Graeber thinking about debt. “One has to pay one’s debts,” the lawyer said when she found out Graeber was in favor of debt amnesty for third-world countries. Debt: The First 5,000 Years was the long answer to that . . . . Continue Reading »

In a lively meditation on money based on Daniel Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years , John Medaille challenges the standard account of the rise of money. Rather that moving from barter to money to credit, Medaille suggests that the historical evidence suggests the opposite is the case. . . . . Continue Reading »

Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang assesses the South Korean economic miracle in his Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (pp. 12-15). It is indeed miraculous. South Korea has gone from being one of the world’s poorest countries to having a per capita . . . . Continue Reading »

My son Smith (15) has been composing music for the last few years and has recently made some of it public here: http://soundcloud.com/bigrocksbreakwindows . Encourage the young man by taking a listen. . . . . Continue Reading »

In Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (pp. 415-6), von Mises argues that there is a link between Jesus’ announcement of “God’s own reorganization” of the world and Bolshevism. Both are “utterly negative.” Jesus “rejects everything that exists . . . . Continue Reading »

In warning his readers against bowing to idols in his Exhortation to Martyrdom ( Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works , p. 75 ), Origen finds that he has to address an issue in the philosophy of language. If “names are merely conventional and have no relations to . . . . Continue Reading »