In the 1930s' "Great Depression," prices were low; so, unfortunately, were wages. In the 1970s, on the other hand, the situation was more like what we see today. Wages didn't drop, but the number of job openings did, and every time you went shopping, the same things cost more than they had last month. It was known as "runaway inflation." There were several things private individuals did to resist it.
One of those things was shopping frugally. Manufacturers and retailers need to know that, if it's not food or fuel, and the price on it is higher than it was last year, it's not going to sell. Like cell phones. Verizon thought they were going to force people in my neighborhood to buy those clunky little chunks of plastic that are now called phones, that try to be computers and fail to work as either. People in my neighborhood had been using cell phones that were simply phones and worked as phones, that fitted into our pockets, and that worked on the "prepaid minutes" system in which people chose to pay for as much phone time as we used. (For most of us, that kept our monthly phone costs well below $10.) Verizon thought we were going to go back to monthly phone bills of $40 or $50 or more...to use things that were not actually even mobile since they don't fit into pockets, and that don't work the same way for a week at a time because they're infested with Google updates? ????? What were those Verizon people drinking? And that's why nobody I know except The Grouch has a phone any more. Our Tracfones were nice. Some of us would still use them if the company would support them. But hello, we all survived before they were invented, so we can survive without them now. Verizon's only hope of bringing phone technology back into our lives will be to reactivate our simple, sensible, Google-free phones with actual buttons, lower the cost of prepaid minutes to effectively half what it was before, and guarantee that no changes to the system that worked for us will be considered. Not ever.
Another of those things was paying cash. When we use the "convenience" of allowing third parties to handle our money transactions, those people have to be paid, so the plastic and the electronics build in higher prices. Good stores recognize this and, if they handle non-cash payments, make sure the non-cash payments cover that added cost without passing the added cost on to their cash customers.
Making a full-time job of handling money for other people, without actually adding any value to the world, has always been a risky career choice. Often it was more or less forced on people who were already "outsiders" or "minorities." Then it became one more reason to hate those people..
In Europe, although Europeans are so addicted to tribal wars that they're capable of defining their second cousins as enemy tribes, it was especially easy to hate culture-proud, unassimilated Jews and Muslims. There is no legitimate basis in Christianity for hating Jews or Muslims. Jesus and the apostles were Jews and their teaching was, consistently, to hate nobody. But many Jewish people, and a few Arabs also, drifted around in old Europe, clinging to their heritage, avoiding close contact with those ritually impure Europeans among whom they were strangers and foreigners. That was enough of a basis for hate in the unenlightened Europeans' minds. In many places these foreigners were not allowed to buy land or compete in any skilled trade, so what did that leave them? Some European Jews became professional money handlers. Some, notoriously the Rothschilds, became very rich. And the fact that anyone became rich as a professional money handler always has made and always will make that person hate bait, if anyone else happens to want to cultivate a spirit of hate...and that's where "anti-Semitism," hate toward Jews and/or Arabs, comes from. That's the root of the Nazi Holocaust.
In the United States anyone with a head for numbers can go into the money-handling business, most Jews aren't bankers, most bankers aren't Jews, and very few people have ever cared about the cultural or religious practices of those who buy land as long as the land in question is not adjacent to ours, so to most of us the idea of hating Jews makes no sense. It's not that we're entirely free from that spirit of distrust toward people who aren't like us, whose bodies speak different languages from ours, so their faces seem "inscrutable" and, if we're really stupid visual-thinking types, terrifying. It's that we've always had at least two physically recognizable "race" types as focal points for any fear of differences among people we feel. Euro-Americans are unlikely to hate people who mutter different prayers than they do when they have people with really different-looking faces to hate.
But if the banker who repossesses our houses when we're not making money because of the depressed economy could be identified, in town after town after town, as being Jewish or English or Pitjantjatjara or any other ethnic type, consistently, then we'd hate whatever type that was. For valid reasons. Even if, as in the case of European Jews, you cannot tell by looking whether a person belongs to the tribe of the money handlers or not. A hundred years ago the Germans, lamenting that they had to take money to the store in a wheelbarrow to buy enough groceries to carry home in a purse, would have been thinking more clearly if they'd aimed their hate toward "Jewish bankers, bankers, banking," rather than "Jews." Ezra Pound's rant about "Usura" was on the right track. But when people have reason to hate someone, it's easy for "...and all his kin" to creep into their hate.
This web site vigorously denounces the hate-based tradition that allowed money handling as a profession ever to be identified with any ethnic group. In our American tradition, which is far from perfect but better than anything that ever developed on Europe's polluted soil, we believe access to any honorable occupation, including farming, should be available to all people on equal terms. Nobody is or should ever be pushed into money handling.
Currently India's ancient traditions of ritualized bureaucratic paper-pushing, chicanery, and actually having a high incidence of the math gene, seem to be attracting international corporations that handle money. We deplore the obsolete association of money-handling careers with Jews, and we would hate to see an equally hate-producing association form between money-handling careers and Indians.
This web site does not even altogether condemn money handling--it's a luxury stupid people are willing to pay for, their stupidity, their choice. We regard it as a sort of "victimless crime," on the same moral level with prostitution when that's a choice the woman involved makes for herself. Morally, exploiting other people's incompetence is hardly a "right occupation." Morality is a choice that can't be enforced on people. If they can't be good, at least they can be "good at" what they choose to do.
This web site does, however, say that if we want to recover any grip on rising prices, money handling should be the first luxury we cut out of our budgets. Shred the plastic. Pay cash. Buy things at stores that give a discount for cash payment.
Boycott Paypal and Venmo. By reserving the right to "fine" your account for any kind of transaction they claim to disapprove of, they're basically claiming a right to dip into your account whenever their own funds run low. Don't pay for things online. If you buy things online or by mail, use a money order, for which you pay a business or government agency to handle one particular transaction...and you pay for the money order with cash.
If you hear of a business in your neighborhood that is trying to "phase out cash payments"...it should take less than a month to "phase out" that business. Make sure everyone knows that having anything to do with that business is supporting censorship, snooping, spying, and treason against the United States. It should take a long, hard time for anyone connected with such a business to find a job in which the person will make no decisions and handle no money. Businesses that survive the current depression should collect payments in a way that accurately reflects the cost of non-cash payments, and puts all of that burden on the card carriers.
Smart people have always been "unbanked" or, if we used banks at all, limited our use to a simple savings account. Nice people have always carried cash, because nice people want to support small businesses rather than big ones.
If you want to know, before you go into a store, what you are going to be able to buy with the amount of money you planned to spend, NEVER CARRY PLASTIC. NEVER TRADE ON YOUR IDENTITY. Always pay cash. It's the easiest way to stick to a budget, and it's also an easy way to keep actual hidden costs down and fight inflation.
There's nothing wrong with saving money, even if you use a bank to do that...but Christians need to understand that, when Jesus said the words translated as ""Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers," or "In that case you ought to have lent my money out at interest," He was expressing what an angry man would say to the poor-spirited employee who had only saved the original coin the boss entrusted to him. Jesus told that story in at least three different versions, on different days, so we know that the historical details of how much money was given to each man, whether the employer was a king or a storekeeper, etc., didn't matter. The point is that God expects us to use the talents God has given us. One was given a lot of money because he was expected to invest it well; he did, and was abundantly rewarded. One was given less money, but he invested it wisely and was proportionately rewarded. Then at the end of the line came this poor feeble wimp clutching his one coin, or it may have been a sack of coins, whining, "Please, milord, I saved all of your money--I buried it in the ground," and the boss sneered at him, knowing that as a (probably not very observant) Jew this man had heard that lending money at interest to other Jews was a crime and lending money at interest to foreigners was despised, "Better you should have lent the money out at interest." From the exposition of this parable in the Bible we get our modern use of "talents" to mean other things besides a unit of weight used primarily for coins. Many of us now think of things like natural abilities, energy, education, even before we think of things like money and connections as talents. God expects us to use all of our advantages for the good of God's Kingdom. We're not told how important the literal story was to Jesus, and other Bible passages recommend saving over extravagant spending, but the literal story does tell us that in a general way He recommended investment in our local enterprises and community over saving money in international banks.
Jesus never actually said "Thou shalt never have any kind of savings account, however small, just for the sake of having a relationship with a local bank that allows you to accept international payment in the day when there shall arise a thing known as the Internet which shall make it possible that in one day you may sell more of your honest work in Greece, and another day in New Zealand, and a third day in Ukraine, than you sell in your own town, when prices shall be so exceedingly inflated that it would be exceedingly difficult for any of your customers to pay you in honest coins; yea verily, in that day, thou shalt stand upon principle and receive payment in coins only." Personally I would like to think that the small savings account that makes it easy to process international payments is morally acceptable. (At present, for me at least, it's not being made possible, because the banks have been told they need to be able to send mail to a building other than the post office, and I've tried and confirmed that it is feasible for me to receive mail only at the post office. But that's a separate issue. I think.)
But more than that--any investment in banks, or in the money handling business--the Bible consistently and soundly condemns, at all times, for all time, and not only when it's needed to fight inflation.
Not all readers of this web site care what the Bible says. But they, too, need to cut payments to money handlers out of their budgets, to stop inflation.
When the bankers start to feel the pain of inflation, prices will come down.
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