LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
else was land on which you couldn’t plant or let your flocks graze. And if all the land was in the possession of someone else, you and your family starved. Many primitive agriculturalists make some sort of provision for equal access to land. Julius Caesar, in The Gallic War , mentions that among certain Germanic tribes it was not “permissible to remain dwelling in one place for more than a year.” The zero-sum nature of land is the opposite of the modern economy, where we can make more of everything. We can, in effect, make more land by vastly increasing the agricultural productivity of farms and fields. We can, in actuality, make more land by piling up the landings in skyscrapers. Worthy of note in Leviticus Chapter 25 is an exception to the Jubilee redistribution of land. Leviticus 25:30 ... the house that is in the walled city shall be established for ever to him that bought it throughout his generations: it shall not go out in the jubile. People with their home in a walled city are presumably not farmers or shepherds. They’re making a living from services, crafts, and trade.
Services, crafts, and trade are not – and never were, not even back when Moses was floating down the Nile in his baby basket – zero-sum endeavors. The other circumstance that the Israelites faced was predatory lending. I’m talking about something much worse than payday loans. With payday loans there is, at least, a payday. This wasn’t always so among primitive agriculturalists. The crops and herds of the second millennium B.C. were hit-or-miss. One too many lions lying down with your lambs and you could be wiped out. The land of milk and honey may have been, climatically, a little sweeter and milkier than it is today, but it was still grievously prone to droughts. Farming is by nature credit-dependent. Income arrives once a year. Sometimes it’s bounteous and can hold you through the next harvest. Sometimes it’s nil, and when planting time comes, you’ve eaten your seed corn. The predatory lenders of the time were like the Mafia loan sharks of today. They had no commercial interest in you getting out of debt. These lenders wanted the “vigorish.” They wanted the “juice.” (Literally, if you were growing grapes or olives.) Worse, they wanted you to fail to pay the vig, so they could move in on your business. These were coercive loans. When you ran out of resources to repay, you’d have to “lease” your land to the lender. When you ran out of land to lease, you’d have to lease yourself and become the lender’s bond servant.
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The zero-sum nature of land is the opposite of the modern economy, where we can make more of everything.
8 | November 2017
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