In a new book titled ‘Something For Nothing,’ author David Hunt breaks down the pernicious, and practically ubiquitous, rise of usury in our modern culture, and why the Catholic Church always stood against the sinful and destructive practice of interest-making lending
by Frank Wright
“Radix malorum est cupiditas,” reads the first letter of St. Paul to Timothy as translated in St. Jerome’s Vulgate. The full quote, often translated as “the love of money is the root of all evil,” is a theme renewed in this latest account of financial wickedness from Os Justi Press.
The book, like the memorable quote, delivers far more on examination than is offered at first glance. In Something For Nothing, author David Hunt gives the reader a whirlwind tour of Catholic teaching, Roman Law, Aristotelian logic and the pronouncements of past popes to show precisely how the treasure of the Church lies not only in the salvation of souls, but in the power of its teaching to deliver us from evil today.
The evil here, of course, is usury – commonly understood in the modern world as the charging of interest on loans. Hunt shows how and why this is not a total understanding of the sin of demanding “something for nothing,” with an analysis so complete and clear as to commend him as a future minister of finance for a Catholic state.
Yet his book has an explanatory power which reaches far beyond its subject. Though Hunt’s excellent formation in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas lends his work the authority of an expert, its subject is rendered in a readable and digestible progression from the beginnings of the concept of usury to its present end.
If you read it, you will emerge from the experience with a better grasp of how the social reality you inhabit has been created, establishing obvious injustice and disorder as the basis of the new world order. In a startling conclusion, he reveals that the condition of modern man under usury is that of a slave. Careful to show his work, his answers are all the more arresting as they also happen to be true.
Hunt begins by noting the significance of the difference between things. His point is initially about goods which are consumed by use (like wine and food) and those which are not (money). This determines whether it is just or not to charge for them for having been used. In the modern world it is said to be just to apply a charge for the mere use of money – a price – whilst the sum initially loaned is also returned in full. This is the something for nothing of the title – that the money made in interest is gained by no fair exchange, and with no loss to the lender.
Here Hunt’s subject provides an illustration of the disordered spirit of our age.
The noting of basic differences between things said to be the same is the basis of the undermining of our reality generally. Hunt’s book will arm the reader with the Catholic formation to combat this assault on the real, and on the natural order ordained by God. At a time of civilizational crisis, Hunt’s is a book which demonstrates that the Catholic Church has the answers.
It is the sort of book which teaches you how to think better about everything by examining one thing, and as such is a treasure in itself. Brief, at only 78 pages, it is sandwiched by a helpful glossary at the front, and informative appendices at the back, including the import of Roman law, the philosophy of Aristotle, the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Council of Vienne, and those of Popes Callistus III, Leo X, Pius V, Innocent XI, and Benedict XIV.
This sound basis in Catholic doctrine is partnered with a keen eye for the competing explanations of the counterfeit culture of the 20th century. Hunt’s treatment of British economist J.M. Keynes provides on page 40 one of the most succinct summaries of the crisis of our times.
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Keynes not only acknowledged but legitimized the wickedness of usury in a wider context of complete moral inversion, saying in 1963, “For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.”
Keynes was quoting Macbeth here, a fable of cupidity in which ambition and lust for power corrupts the natural order completely. Murder and madness are the result. Keynes was speaking in defense of the construction of a new liberal order, backed by useful “avarice and usury.”
We are sixty years into his century, and the result has been the production of a similar and predictable tragedy in our entire way of life.
Hunt demonstrates that the Church teaches it is unjust to charge for non-existent things. This could also apply to the promises of Liberal Utopianism more generally. From the “barren metal” of Aristotle and the excellent arguments of Hilaire Belloc, Hunt displays that the tradition of the Church has ample treasure to restore our civilization from the ruin caused by these reckless dreamers, which he notes has fallen victim to a simple fascination with novelty.
Hunt shows the poverty of the modern notion that “old” means “redundant,” and new always “improved,” against the charge that tradition can be discarded because it was of its time. He gives short shrift to the objection, made by libertarians and their Austrian economist heroes, that the rejection of usury was simply a mediaeval relic for which we moderns have no use. This is the same tactic used by philosophers more generally, as Hunt is aware, to get around the problem of Aquinas.
We have this new thing now, is the general idea. We have no need of this invincible wisdom we cannot counter. Hunt shows how this neophilia is simply a means of recasting old vices as refreshing innovations. The vice here that is made virtuous is not only the love of money, but the lengths to which men will go to make these new things seem a necessity. Here, of course, the work becomes a critique of the counterfeit culture intended to replace that founded by the Catholic Church.
St. Jerome’s original Latin, from the letter of St. Paul to Timothy, gives a more complete understanding of the nature of this particular evil.
“Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas quam quidam appetentes erraverunt a fide et inseruerunt se doloribus multis,” or “The root of all evil is cupidity, and men in pursuit of their appetite for greed have abandoned the faith, piercing themselves with many evils.”
Cupidity is the desire “for goods of any kind” – except the Good, which is of course God. Hunt’s book is a manual for those who wish to be delivered from the evil which animates our times.
In a system which replaces everything with nothing through commodified desire, it is vital to understand the financial crime which powers it.
Usury has bankrolled and normalized the creation of this counterfeit culture, depriving not only your cash, but the rest of your life of genuine value. To read Hunt’s brief and illuminating book is to examine the root and not merely the fruit of the counter-civilizational experiment we inhabit.
