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Comment by 4ff6f7fd26e | Hacker News Reader

> Anyone who puts their money on the line knows the risks, this isn't stealing from the poor.

The problem here is that, for example, at least in the US, not everyone with a pension or who "contibutes" to a retirement plan is comfortable or even aware of the risks. That ignorance is not a defense, per-se, but if you've got blinders on that you're fleecing pennies off the already rich you are sorely mistaken.

I'd go so far as to argue that turning money into more money without providing a good or service in exchange is squarely immoral.

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C. S. Lewis on interest (from Mere Christianity):

>There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest — what we call investment — is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or “usury” as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only dunking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said.

>That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilizations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.

You can find plenty of stuff that those three groups agree on that would horrify modern people. It's a really poor argument.

The quotation is factual and avoids making an argument. I'm not sure what you're trying to refute.

Alternatively, it's exactly because modern people would be horrified at what those three groups agree on that it is an excellent argument.

Cool! Now we have two equally credible arguments from antiquity.

Perhaps it's time to consider forming some fundamental principles and reasoning from them instead?

That would be good, except that if you told anyone about it, they'd probably be horrified.

I mean, I already believe in a lot of basic principles that would horrify a lot of people - free speech, freedom of religion, I don't care at all what someone's sexual orientation is, and so on.

So I don't see where this should stop us from trying to form principles as an alternative to arguing that something must be or must not be true because of what someone wrote down millennia ago.

Investment returns are not usury - see sharia banking

>Originally, usury meant interest of any kind.[0]

For example, here's Aristotle on usury[1]:

>There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of an modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury

[1] http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.html

How does "not to increase at interest" rule out investing in trade ?

The service in this case is facilitating a trade. Liquidity is important, but I think it was oversold to pull some of the PR heat off of HFT. Especially since a lot of retail investing advice has turned to index funds, liquidity for individual stocks matters less for them -- it also means they don't have to understand as much financial info before investing (just read the index's prospectus every year vs. reading a whole bunch of company financial filings every quarter).

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