YOUTH FUTURES: What is "usury"? God's work? A sin? A crime?

Usury is the old-fashioned term for lending money and charging interest. It's what money lenders, pawn shops, and banks do.

It has gone in and out of style over the centuries, but mostly out. Only two periods accepted it completely: the high point of the Roman Republic and Empire, and today's industrial civilization.

The president of a large bank recently claimed that he was just "doing God's work" (Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, 2010). The hard, cold fact is that religions, especially Christianity and Islam, are opposed to usury, calling it a mortal sin.

What could cause such a difference of opinion?

We can find the answer by looking to see what the height of Rome, and today's industrial civilization, have in common. Rome was sucking up slaves and treasure from every place it could get its hand on, from Britain to Persia, Germany to Africa. During the last 300 years, we have been sucking up all the coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium we could get our hands on.

When a civilization has lots of extra "energy," from slaves and plunder, or fossil fuels and uranium, it can grow and expand. When a civilization is expanding, people can borrow money for business, and will make so much money in the process, that they can pay back the borrowed money plus interest.

All the rest of the time, when civilization isn't growing and expending, it doesn't work. Lending money at interest just becomes a drug to suck the remaining life out of the most desperate people. That's why religions are against it.

Our civilization has been growing and expanding long enough for everyone to forget that growth isn't normal. With the peak of oil pumping in 2005, nuclear power proving to be too dangerous, and nothing to replace them (in spite of a few lies being told to the public), growth has ended.

Usury, lending money at interest, just became a very bad idea, especially if you're the one who borrowed it.