The Usury Battle Continues

The New Mexico state legislature just finished its session with surprisingly good results.  Only a couple of the lawmakers were arrested to drunken driving, there were no reported fistfights, and no one filed any new lawsuits for sexual harassment against the governor.  Even more surprising, the state finally did something about the exorbitantly high interest rates charged in the state.

Usury, the unethical charging of an exorbitant amount of interest on a loan (long a hot topic of debate here in New Mexico) is finally changing.  About four thousand years after Hammurabi solved the problem, the lazy lawmakers up in Santa Fe finally got around to fixing the problem, too. 

If you were to measure the speed at which the legislature moves to solve problems, you’d be hard pressed to find a chronometer.  By comparison, lame Mississippi mud turtles and crippled hearse horses are streaks of lightning.  Eventually, you’d probably end up pacing these sluggish politicians against the formation of stalagmites or the erosions of canyons.  Naturally, you’d have to give the legislature a generous head start.

Supposedly, the argument against the prohibition of interest rates that would make a mafia loan shark blush was that capping the rates would deny the poor a source of credit during an emergency.  Using the same logic, we should allow arson to provide a source of heat during the winter.  It would be cynical of me to suggest that the opponents of such measures receive financial contributions from PACs supported by the loan industry.  

Loans are a necessary part of an expanding economy, and connecting those with money to lend with those who wish to borrow funds to build or expand a business is one of the primary purposes of a bank.  But, what is a fair interest rate to charge for this service?  Across history, there has been an active debate on where to draw the line between a fair rate and an interest rate that takes advantage of the desperation of the borrower.

In roughly 1790 BC, Hammurabi established his code containing a prohibition of interest rates above 33%, a fairly generous rate.  Obviously, the monarch would not have felt the need to establish a maximum rate had there not already been people willing to take an unethical advantage of the desperate need of the borrowers.  

By the time of the Roman Empire, while banking was a relatively small-scale activity for shopkeepers and the lower classes, loans were usually private affairs between rich men seeking to make a profit or to secure funds until harvest time.  While there were no restrictions on the amount of interest that could be charged, the rates usually were 4%, 12%, 24% or some other multiple of four, evidently because of the difficulty of doing math with Roman Numerals.  

After the Romans, the first usury laws were set by religions, the majority of which considered that any form of interest charged against a loan was a sin and thus prohibited, though several religions applied the prohibition only to other members of the same faith, allowing the lender to freely charge interest against non-believers.  

During the Crusades, first England, then many other European countries, used the charge of usury to expel the Jews (although though the Crown’s seizure all of the property of those expelled was probably the chief motive).  After the reformation and the concomitant slow growth of pawn shops, religious leaders relaxed their prohibitions against lending money.  This slow acceptance of loan making and charging interest on the loans was central to the plot of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Slowly, most of the world’s religions either relaxed or completely dropped their prohibitions on lending money.  The Muslim faith still officially prohibits any form of usury, and the twisted logic—both legal and theological—to circumvent this prohibition would require far more space than this blog to explain.

In the United States, there are few federal laws regulating loans, leaving the matter of regulating interest rates up to each state.  The federal government outlaws the use of force to collect a debt and mandates both racial and sexual equality for applicants, but has no laws mandating how much interest can be gouged out of a borrower.  The matter has come up for debate in Congress repeatedly, and the Supreme Court has ruled that Washington has the authority to regulate such rates under the interstate commerce provision of the constitution, but so far Congress has failed to pass any meaningful regulations on the subject.

The states, free to do what they wished with the matter, quickly scattered like a herd of puppies, providing no consensus whatsoever.  Some states mandate a maximum rate on regular loans, but allow short term emergency loans, those Payday Loans marketed to the poor, to charge exorbitant rates.  It is fairly hard to find two neighboring states with the same interest rate.

Here in New Mexico, our legislature met that challenge by passing such impressive legislation as the official state question (“Red or Green?” A reference to your preferred chile.”)  We also built a train no one rides and a Spaceport for a loony Englishman, that has lost at least a quarter of a billion dollars, so far.  It is also still against the law in New Mexico for a woman to pump her own gas or change a flat tire.  It is a petty misdemeanor to play the national anthem “inappropriately”.  What do you expect from a state where the most commonly googled recipe is for Frito pie?

What the state legislature did not do was pass any meaningful measures to regulate the loan sharks that masquerade as Payday Lenders.  

Up until a few years ago, those payday lenders could charge rates up to 1000% in addition to various fees and surcharges:  Fees like the “I Want A Bass Boat Fee” or the “You Are My Bitch Fee”.  Four-digit interest rates were necessary, it was argued, to provide emergency funds for poor people with no established means of credit.  A few years ago, the legislature reached a compromise and lowered the rates to only 175%, and left the various handling fees in place.

Finally, just last week, the New Mexico state legislature got around to fixing a problem that was solved long ago by the Mesopotamian and Hittite civilizations:  they finally brought the maximum interest rate on emergency loans down to only 36%.  Even as I write this, astronomers are searching for a bright star in the east.

While I hope the governor signs the legislation, I would still like to point out that the new rate is still higher that what Hammurabi allowed 4000 years ago.

Do You Live in a Dystopian World?

Secretly, I have a fondness for post-apocalyptic fiction.  Admittedly, if you were to rank this genre of literature, the red-haired stepchild of science fiction, it would probably only rise slightly above bodice rippers, Watership Down, or anything written by Jean Auel.  I can’t help it, however, I’m completely hooked on these novels.

All of these books follow a firmly established 3-step pattern:  The good life is unexpectedly ended forever by the catastrophe leaving the protagonists to struggle for survival in a dystopian world.  This formula was firmly established by Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis and rarely does an author stray from this well-beaten path.  (And just to make sure you understood the lesson, Noah repeated the formula.)

There are some great books in this genre:  Power Play by Kenneth Cameron, Farnham’s Freehold by Robert Heinlein (though I hate the last half of the book), and my personal favorite, Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank.  I have to mention I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson, The Postman by David Brin, and Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle—all of them good books, and far better than the poor movies they spawned.  And since her work is very popular right now, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is a much better book than The Handmaid’s Tale.

It was while reading a new entry in this genre—sadly, one that doesn’t deserve mentioning—that it occurred to me that frequently the protagonists don’t realize the world they knew is gone forever, that they have slowly slid into a dystopian world without realizing they have irrevocably passed the apocalyptic threshold.  Instead of a dramatic apocalyptic event, there was a series of small steps that transpired so slowly, that by the time the situation became desperate, the problems had no solution.  And more often than not, this future world is a desert exactly like the New Mexico I call home.

Naturally, these realizations reminded me of the current pandemic and the inevitable personal question:  Am I already living in a post-apocalyptic world?   Guessing that you, too, are wrestling with this question, I have prepared an informative quiz.

The “Do I Live in a Dystopian World” Quiz.

1. Are you currently hoarding more than 20 rolls of toilet paper?  Though the vast majority of toilet paper is manufactured domestically and the availability is not affected by the problems in the supply chain, grocery stores still report a periodic ‘runs’ on wiper paper.  Meanwhile, all of the upper management at Procter & Gamble (the manufacturers of Charmin) are currently shopping for mega-yachts.  
2. Have you walked into any business unmasked any time recently?  Covid mandates may have been eased, but are there still places you can’t go without wearing a mask?  Five years ago, if I entered my bank wearing a mask, I would have been shot.  Today, everyone in the bank resembles Jesse James.
3. Is your pantry overflowing?  Is your freezer packed?  Do you have still have more than two dozen bags of Ramen noodles you bought during the early days of the pandemic?  Did you buy more cans of Campbell soup than you are likely to need in the next twelve months?  Are you still wondering why you bought all those cans of Spam?
4. Have you bought a gun in the past year?  Twenty million Americans bought a firearm in the last year and one in five of them were first time gun owners.  The last time I went to the local gun range, it seemed like every damn one of those newbie gun owners was there.  Compared to staying at the range with those morons, it would have been safer to drive across Texas in a pink Prius sporting a “Hillary 2024” bumper sticker.
5. Has it been more than 30 days since you ate dinner at a table inside a restaurant, went to a movie theater, visited a museum or library, or had a beer with a friend at a bar?  
6. Are you buying substantially less gas for your car than you did three years ago?  (I think I only filled my car twice in 2021.) 
7. Are the only people you regularly see a small handful of close friends who could qualify as your gang?  Have you gone weeks without smiling at a stranger?  Smiling behind a mask doesn’t count.  Because you are wearing a mask in public and know that people can’t see your facial expressions, do you find yourself acting rudely more often?  (I hope this is common, otherwise, I’m becoming a real asshole…Or perhaps just a bigger one.)
8. 
   In the last year, have you binge watched all of the seasons of more than three television shows?  (I’m guilty of this one, having polished off Bones, Psych, and House.  Currently, I’ve downloaded all 271 episodes of the original Perry Mason and am slowly working my way through them.  Did you know that in season six, while Raymond Burr was recovering from surgery, Bette Davis stepped in and took his place?
9. Does it seem like evil is growing by leaps and bounds?  Is meaningless violence becoming more prevalent daily and…  Oh, hell yes!—This one is a given.  Did you know that violence against Asian women is up 4300% over the last twelve months?  Why?  It is hard to imagine a more gentle, harmless group of Americans. 
10. Have you totally lost confidence in anything any government leader now says?  Has the phrase “follow the science” lost all meaning for you?  Do you still trust and listen to your own personal physician, but believe anyone on television wearing a white lab coat is incapable of correctly stating the date?
11. Do you have masks and hand sanitizer in your coat pocket, in your car, in your purse, or in your office drawer…or (Heaven help us!) in several of the above convenient locales?  Isn’t it kind of strange that your car doesn’t have a first aid kit, but has several surgical masks?

If you answered even half of these in the affirmative, then (unfortunately) you are already living in your own personal science fiction story.  The zombies aren’t staggering down your street:  they are confined to the anchor desks of the evening news and to your state legislature.  There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it, either, beyond grabbing one of the above novels and studying for the final exam.

One last novel I’d recommend:  Try The Children of Men by P. D. James.  Instead of there being a sudden apocalyptic event, it portrays a world transformed by a series of small events that reach a climax in the year 2021.  You know the book has to be great—the main character is a historian.

The Lost Novel of Jules Verne

After decades of dedicated hoarding, I have an extensive library at home, brilliantly organized in such a way that for any given book, I can probably tell you in which room I have misplaced it, with at least a 50% accuracy.  

I also own a Kindle with sufficient memory to hold thousands of books—a virtual library that I can carry in my coat pocket (an unimaginable luxury just a few decades ago).  Unfortunately, due to Amazon’s somewhat unreasonable and stupid policy, my Kindle is no better organized than my home library.  (C’mon Amazon!  At least allow Kindle owners to organize their book collections into directories!)

Luckily, a great many of the books I need to reference frequently are now in the public domain, meaning that I can download them either for free or at a very low cost.  The works of Herodotus, the collected letters of Abraham Lincoln, and the complete Sherlock Holmes stories can all be downloaded for free.  Recently, I was offered the collected works of Jules Verne for only 99 cents, an offer I happily accepted.    

After I downloaded the books, I spent a couple of hours happily rereading some of my favorite stories, and checking to see if the collection was complete, as was advertised.  Unfortunately, it was missing Jules Verne’s latest novel—the one you have probably never heard of, the lost novel of Jules Verne.

Yes, there is a new novel by Jules Verne.  In 1863, Verne was already extremely popular due to the recent publication of Five Weeks In a Balloon.  When Verne submitted his next manuscript to his publisher, he was shocked to discover that his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, refused to publish it, saying, "I was not expecting perfection — to repeat, I knew that you were attempting the impossible — but I was hoping for something better."

Discouraged, Verne never submitted the manuscript to another publisher and began work on his next novel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.  Almost everyone forgot about the manuscript for more than a century, except for a few scholars who discovered the correspondence between Verne and Hetzel, and speculated endlessly on whether the author had destroyed the manuscript.

In 1989, the great-grandson of Verne was disposing of a mountain of collected junk and memorabilia in preparation for selling the rambling four-storied house of the author.  One of the items to be disposed of was a rusty old safe that hadn’t been used in decades.  Since the combination to the safe had long been lost, it took a workman with a blowtorch to open the metal safe.  Inside, the grandson discovered the linen-wrapped manuscript that had been rejected for publication more than a century before.

Finally published in 1994, 131 years after Verne wrote it, Paris in the Twentieth Century was published in France.  Unlike the wide publicity the book received in France, the English translation received little notice in the rest of the world.  In fact, I was unable to find a copy in any nearby library and had to order one.  

In the book, Verne describes life in Paris during August, 1960, some 55 years after the author’s death.   This is a grim dystopian world in which business and technology have completely taken over society, completely eclipsing traditional cultural activities such as the arts and literature.  While more books than ever before are being published, very few Parisians bother to read the current bestsellers, such as “Poetic Parallelogram”, “Meditations on Oxygen”, or “A Practical Treatise for the Lubrication of Driveshafts.”  Verne presents a Paris where the love of painting and sculpture for their own sakes is a discarded ideal of the past that is no longer consistent with the “age’s industrial goals”.

While music is still being produced, it is more of a work of mathematics than an artistic pursuit.  The result is a cacophony of sound and disharmony.  (Here, Verne was a trifle early, as it seems that happened about thirty years after Verne predicted.)

As might be expected from a work by Verne, the author prophetically describes a variety of technological accomplishments long before their actual invention.  The streets are lit with electric lights, people travel in horseless carriages powered by internal combustion engines, driverless pneumatic rails travel underground allowing passengers to disembark and board at Metro stations.  In Verne’s future Paris, the guillotine has been replaced with the electric chair (roughly a quarter of a century before the actual invention) and its use is popularly supported because the method is closest to the “better imitation of divine vengeance”.

Although Verne has the entire world connected by a tight grid of telegraph wires that use fax machines to send photos and documents, he fails to predict telephones or the television.  And strangely, though metal nibs were already used on ink pens in the 1860’s, the people of Paris in the 1960’s use quills to write.  

I really don’t want to give too much of the plot of this book away…just how often in a lifetime are we likely to be able to read a new book by an author who has been dead for 117 years?  Be forewarned, however, that this is not the Jules Verne of Around the World in Eighty Days or 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea, this book is more along the lines of Franz Kafka meets George Orwell, decades before either author were born.  Far from an adventure story, this work is a tragedy that resembles the pessimistic work Verne published later in life, after the death of his editor, Hetzel.

Because of a peculiar loophole in our copyright laws, even though the book is ‘new’, it is already in the public domain because the author has been dead for more than 75 years.  If you would like to read a copy, you will find it here for free.  You can download it, and keep it on your Kindle, like I did.

If Elected, I Will Not Serve

I was making chicken fajitas, and I used half of both a red and a green bell pepper.  The remainders I sliced up for use the next day, securely locking them into a nice glass container that I use just for that purpose.  Then I very carefully opened the dishwasher, placing the vegetable container on the rack.  While the fajitas were cooking, I went ahead and ran the dishwasher.  The bell peppers are very clean.

There is an easy explanation for this behavior:  I’m old.  Not very old, but definitely old.  I’m still just short of being a septuagenarian, but I do remember President Eisenhower played too much golf.  (Perhaps it’s because I’m a historian, but I tend to date things by presidential eras.)

There are many subjects where I have a greater knowledge or ability to understand far better than when I was younger, but I am definitely finding it much harder to memorize specific details about some subjects.  During a recent Art History course, I found it extremely difficult to memorize the artists’ names and the dates paintings were created.  I could understand the paintings, and even remember details about the artists’ lives (and could probably discuss the iconography in detail) but I sometimes couldn’t quite remember the artists’ names.  

As I have aged, I’ve changed in other ways, too.  I have become both more intolerant and critical about a wide range of subjects that I will just lump together and call stupidity.  (For the sake of kindness, I will not specifically name all the members of the Enema U Administration that should be neutered in a medical procedure involving two bricks and a bucket of rubbing alcohol.)  My wife, The Doc, suggests that—perhaps—I become a trifle “intense” at times.

All of the above gently suggests that I am probably not a good candidate to become the next President of the United States.  Neither is anyone else who is either as old as or older than, I am.

While I disagree with President Joe Biden on many political issues, I firmly believe that he is, fundamentally, a good and decent man who genuinely wants to serve his country.  Unfortunately, I also believe that he is too old to do the job well.  Frankly, every morning when I read the newspaper, I expect to see a story about how the United Nations is taking America to the international court in The Hague and collectively charging us with elder abuse.  

That last sentence isn’t just tongue-in-cheek blog humor—the literally hardest and most demanding job in the world is currently held by a man 79 years old.  Of the leaders of all industrialized nations in the world, only the Queen of England and Pope Francis are older than our president.

I’m not picking on President Biden—there are clearly politicians in both parties who have….well…let’s just say their ‘sell by dates’ are long passed.  If we were to set a maximum age for political leaders at age seventy (like many countries), 71% of the Senate would have to retire.  I picked age seventy as a retirement age because over half of the states have already picked seventy as the upper age limit for judges.  Arkansas is particularly punitive to the elderly:  the state now has a law specifying that any state judge who refuses to retire at age seventy loses all retirement benefits.

Scientists who have studied the problem of aging suggest that cognitive decline by age seventy is inevitable.  While more years may provide the elderly with more experience and more wisdom, it doesn’t alter them fact that as we pass our sixties, we can’t do quite as much nor do it quite as quickly.  While the level of decline may vary with individuals, there is measurable decline in everyone by the time they reach seventy.

Recent studies conducted at Harvard and M.I.T. suggest that there are several different kinds of cognitive activity that reach their highest peak at different ages.  While vocabulary, a good indication of overall intelligence, doesn’t reach an intellectual peak until the sixties or early seventies, all other intellectual activities peak much earlier.  

Most mental processes like memory, pattern recognition, and the ability to mentally react quickly peak in a person’s twenties.  The ability to recognize and remember emotional states in other people reach their utmost in the forties, while general knowledge and reading comprehension peak in the fifties.  Unfortunately, after the early seventies, it’s all downhill.  All measurable mental tasks slowly erode with time.

Perhaps the most significant erosion occurs in an elderly person’s ability to pay attention to more than one task at a time.  While mental multi-tasking is difficult at any age, tests reveal that the ability drops by half between the ages of 35 and 65.  Needless to say, the job of President requires the ability to multi-task far more than most jobs.  

It all of the above weren’t dishearteningly enough, there is a long list of diseases that target the elderly.  Aging is a key risk factor for most of the common neurodegenerative diseases, specifically dementias like Alzheimer’s disease, cerebrovascular disease, Parkinson’s disease and Lou Gehrig’s disease.  While the risk of an individual’s developing these diseases is incredibly difficult to calculate, their incidence definitely increases with age.

As we age, there is a natural tendency for us to be more conservative and to insulate ourselves from new ideas, new technology, and new fashions.  There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does make it more difficult to make decisions that will affect those who do not share our history and traditions.  These traits don’t necessarily disqualify someone from a position of authority, but they hardly serve as attractive traits.

Perhaps it is time for Congress to enact legislation that restricts candidacy to those under the age of seventy as of the date of the election.  Those still in office when they reach age seventy could remain in office, but would not be allowed to run for reelection.

I’ve noticed that the elderly are frequently credited with honor and distinction simply because of their age and are given respect for experience and wisdom in advance of any evidence of its existence.  From my experience, the net distribution of intelligence and stupidity seem to be about the same regardless of age.  Perhaps we need to remember that growing old doesn’t require a lot of brains…it just takes a long time.