Later on, the Byzantines worked out a really cunning improvement called the Kapnikon that threw most of the compliance and administration burden onto the people while still being less of a burden on them overall than the previous Poll Tax (so it was accepted more readily than analogues in other times and places), and which also incrementally reduced collection problems even further by encouraging large, supportive families/households because those paid the same tax as small ones. That didn’t lower the tax take, just made larger targets, because the rates were raised as households grew (it’s a Tragedy of the Commons mechanism). It was almost self-enforcing – tax evaders were often rounded up by their fellows so they wouldn’t have to make up the shortfall themselves.

Oh, I didn’t catch that.

The Federal Reserve certainly implements a subtle but massive form of regressive taxation by giving first spending power to those connected to the state. That’s bad, but the term ‘usury’ has the specific connotation of stigmatising the charging of interest on the basis of the false belief that physical production is real and valuable while abstract or conceptual production (‘brainwork’) is not. This concept is dangerous not only to financiers but also to artists, intellectuals, entrepeneurs, hospitality and helping professionals, and anyone else whose profession produces something which you can’t hold in your hand. Dante put the usurers in Hell next to the sodomites and blasphemers because the Medieval mind saw all three as violations of a mythic natural social-metaphysical order (which the Church is still quite ready to restore if it ever gets the chance). In much of the Islamic world prohibitions on interest are still a serious obstacle to economic modernisation, just as equivalent prohibitions in the social realm prevent the emergence of an individualist civil society.

And, indeed, the increasing prevelance of the term ‘usury’ in what passes for today’s libertarian movement has been accompanied by a “red state” American nativism rife with anti-intellectualism and conspiracy theories worthy of the Protocols. Which is a good reason why knowledge workers with any sense of history would be wise to withdraw their sanction from libertarianism until this changes. The only revolutions that improve things are those which respect the abstract economy and protect developed cultural capital even as they overthrow an unjust establishment which exercises hegemony over and within it. ‘Usury’ and similar concepts have long been used to encourage oppressed people to take their anger out on the wrong targets. Granted, many people who take up the ‘usury’ battle cry don’t intend to invoke this history. But plenty on the political Right know precisely what they are doing when they use the concept, and its usage by libertarianism has encouraged the hopelessly blurred boundaries between what was once a civilised radical individualism and a noxious radical racial-religious populism.

2) “Don’t be afraid” should warn any person of sense that the author of the propaganda suspects that you’ve reasons to feel fear.

3) Neither the Left nor libertarianism needs to revive the concept of “usury” in public discourse.