CXXVI. The Usury of Everything

Editor’s Note: Weekly, there are new insults to the American legacy. It is exhausting. One man, an Ananias with a factual record of escaping accountability via divorce, bankruptcy, and lawsuits, is taking the country through the same adventure. So deep is the cultish behavior that many Americans are viewing unnecessary inflation, war, and authoritarian actions as either necessary evils or the unseen hand of God. Both are delusional and counter to the lessons of history. Every strongman, whether Caesar, Hitler, Putin, Orban, Pinochet, or Mao, worked to blend state and religious idolatry together to stay in power.

Recognize it before it’s too late.

Each generation typically has more freedom than the last. In America, freedom of choice comes with our national identity, from how we vote to how we eat lunch. Yet in practice, we've built a culture that makes the wrong choices easier, cheaper, and more seductive than the right ones. Freedom without guardrails has curdled into manipulation disguised as choice.

This isn't a new problem. Medieval societies understood that unchecked lending destroyed people, families, and communities. Usury laws set the terms under which lending could exist without becoming predatory. The lender's freedom to charge any rate was recognized as incompatible with a functioning civic order. We understood this once. Then we forgot it, and handed the controls to the people with the most to gain from your worst decisions.

Consider the phone in a teenager's hand. Once a tool for communication, it's now a perpetual distraction machine. Schools struggle to maintain focus while students scroll through an infinite supply of dopamine rewards, each notification engineered to feel urgent. (Quick sidenote, while walking in the neighborhood the other day, I passed by a daycare with all the under 5 kids outside playing while all four staff members were on their phones).

Education requires a bit of patience, even silence, and a bit of discouragement and discomfort. Social media thrives on feeling right with noise and speed.

This isn't a level playing field.

We are raising a generation fluent in likes but illiterate in attention, and someday we may look back on the smartphone as the simplest and most effective instrument ever designed for manufacturing useful idiots, people who mistake stimulation for understanding. No one regulated the architecture of addiction. The market decided, and the market chose engagement over development.

Fast food follows the same logic. Cheap and omnipresent, not because it nourishes anyone, but because it feeds corporate margins. The real cost of that burger is externalized, paid later in health crises, environmental degradation, and public subsidies. For the working single mother who needs cheap protein for her kids, this is not a choice. It's an economically coerced convenience. The options exist. The meaningful ones don't.

Credit cards are usury rebranded. They promise empowerment but function as private taxation on the poor. Debt in America has become so normalized that living within one's means feels almost archaic. The average household juggles multiple cards, refinancing loans with loans, participating in an endless churn that props up consumer growth while stifling personal freedom. The house of credit resembles a religion now, faith in tomorrow's income masking today's insolvency. We dismantled the guardrails that once made this kind of extraction illegal. We called it liberation, a word now used against the very efforts of protection.

Healthcare completes the picture. In the wealthiest nation on earth, illness remains a marketable commodity. When access to care depends on employment or luck, freedom becomes conditional. It's not that people don't care about their health. It's that the system profits from the illusion of choice while delivering the reality of debt.

Here is the mechanism, plainly stated: corporate influence purchases deregulation. Deregulation enables predatory products. Predatory products extract wealth from the people least able to absorb the loss. Those people end up with fewer actual choices than before. The expansion of consumer options has coincided with the contraction of real freedom. More items on the menu, less money to pay for any of them. That's not irony. That's the point.

I know the old argument that no one forces anyone to eat fast food, watch TikTok, or rack up debt. But this argument misses something essential: power differentials shape choice. When the default settings of a society reward impulse and punish restraint, individual freedom becomes an illusion woven into the fabric of consumerism. People make choices, yes, but within boundaries calculated by those who profit from them. Buyer beware was never meant to be a governing philosophy. It was a warning.

The predatory strain of modern American capitalism doesn't work through coercion. It works through convenience. It resists regulation not because it champions liberty, but because regulation interferes with the profitability of bad decisions. This is what the old usury laws grasped and what we have since abandoned: a functioning society cannot be built entirely on buyer beware. Some transactions require a referee. Some choices require conditions in which choosing well is actually possible.

The tools for better choices still exist. Parents can push for phone-free classrooms. Citizens can support policies that prioritize health, education, and debt relief over short-term profit. Technology and capitalism are not inherently corrosive (and this is going to be the issue of our times). They become destructive only when we surrender critical thought in exchange for frictionless comfort.

We can protect the right to choose, but also cultivate the capacity to choose well. That means creating conditions where discernment is easier than distraction, and reflection more rewarding than rage. Freedom, after all, is not about having options. It's about having wisdom, and a system that doesn't profit from your lack of it.

I don’t expect you to know who this is. I also don’t expect you to read The Nation, which has a couple of authors whose writing I really like, but tends to be alarmist at times. What I want you to get from this piece is how leaders, removed from the results of their decisions, can do things that ultimately lead to terrible outcomes. Proper governance and ethics in business would 100% call for an assessment of technology that can find, monitor, and kill one’s enemies, and what we are quickly learning is that the current regime finds enemies everywhere. That is dangerous for the country. If you think we can “kill them all”, or that our actions today will have no reverberation to actions tomorrow that put our kids and their kids into conflicts, as this article states, you’ve done no introspection. This is the current state of American capitalism, which is to sell first and ask questions later. Remember this type of narrow-minded viewpoint when it comes to robots replacing human labor and drones used clandestinely and arbitrarily to surveil and kill with secret oversight.

Speaking of the peril of choices, the current regime is so empty of courage and wisdom that we forget what a blunder the Afghan war was. To make matters worse, we have abandoned those who helped keep our American men and women safe while serving there. There’s an old saying that two wrongs don’t make a right, and in this case, the message to the world is that the United States does not stand by its word.

No business could survive this. No family would raise its children this way. The arbitrariness we are purposely inflicting on once-allied countries is devoid of character and reason. And these are the simple decisions. The U.S., as the world’s melting pot, has been the leader in almost all areas of commerce. People who are free to grow and prosper create many good things. Countries that become zealous in nationalism serve no moral compass except self-preservation, a startlingly inept philosophy that never lasts. It is especially absurd when everyone shares the same planet. Nationalism and tribalism are archaic modes of existence that we must outgrow.

And Now….

Center yourself with the following observation. We all share the same planet. Regardless of our beliefs and what we consider true, we all originate from and belong to the same ball of earth and clay. Continuing to fight over it for an individual ego is insanity.

Always strive to be a good human.