Michael Hudson has devoted his career to the study of debt.
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The pioneering research by one of the founders of economic anthropology is essential for understanding the social and institutional processes that gave rise to money as we know it.
The oligarchic tradition of landgrabbing and tax dodging goes back centuries.
This Roman concept of property is essentially creditor-oriented. As Rome’s power grew, practices quickly became predatory.
Giorgio Buccellati’s
At the Origins of Politics takes readers to the early stages of a process that became the structure of modern life.
Economist Michael Hudson traces the changing form of organization of labor shaped economies, fiscal policy and property rights over time.
When interest-bearing debt came west to Greece, it was decoupled from Clean Slates. This opened the way for oligarchic abuses.
Today’s state has turned over profit-seeking activity to the private sector. It runs its operations at a loss, and finances them by levying taxes on the private-sector surplus.
The ability to prevent rentier oligarchies from emerging turns out to be the key distinction between “kingship” (or modern socialism) and “free market” economies.
Examining the debt crises that creditors have caused throughout history may help us out of a modern economic emergency.
Michael Hudson examines some of the specific conditions that led to the practice of charging interest.
Reforms by “tyrants” introduced coinage, debt forgiveness and a fairer distribution of wealth.
There are alternatives to leaving society to the mercy of predatory wealth-seeking individuals—one example is Bronze Age Mesopotamia.
Today’s debt overhead is transferring land, natural resources, and infrastructure monopolies into the hands of a rentier class. This has happened before and it doesn’t end well.
The history of antiquity shows that evolution is not inevitably carried upward by economic or technological potential automatically realizing itself. Entrepreneurs have obtained surpluses through the ages, but often in ways that injure society as a whole.
The changing context for enterprise through the centuries reminds us that business activities are not universal but fluid and alter according to society’s practical priorities and ethics.
A public entrepreneurial initiative is difficult for many modern observers to acknowledge because we have virtually inverted the relations of Bronze Age enterprise and finance.
Silver was primarily used by the Palace for entrepreneurial purposes, a means of increasing wealth for the public good.
Today’s creditor-oriented ideology depicts the archaic past as much like our own world, as if civilization was developed by individuals thinking in terms of modern orthodoxy.
Whether in the realms of trade or agriculture, the operative principle was that debtors should not lose their economic liberty by being held liable for “acts of God.”
Many of our modern financial constructs were invented in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. One of these was interest-bearing debt.
Not only were “modern” elements of enterprise present and even dominant already in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC, but the institutional context was conducive to long-term growth.
Offshore banking and tax-avoidance centers are nothing new; they’ve been with us for millennia.
A fight for ascendancy between Rome and Constantinople led to a new relationship between Popes, Kings, and bankers that both funded the Crusades and formed a new economic system.
While the Magna Carta typically is depicted as the birth of England’s fight to create democracy, the 13th-century struggle was to establish what would become the House of Lords, not the House of Commons.
From the very beginning, money was a public institution, its value administered in antiquity by civic authorities taking control of commerce and markets.
Michael Hudson (born March 14, 1939) is an American economist, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He is a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. He is a contributor to the Hudson Report, a weekly economic and financial news podcast produced by Left Out.
Hudson graduated from the University of Chicago (BA, 1959) and New York University (MA, 1965, PhD, 1968) and worked as a balance of payments economist in Chase Manhattan Bank (1964–68). He was assistant professor of economics at the New School for Social Research (1969–72) and worked for various governmental and non-governmental organizations as an economic consultant (1980s–1990s).
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