Reading an interview with Economic anthropoligist David Graeber, by Phillip Pilkington.   I was struck by this:

Interest-bearing loans, in turn, probably originated in deals between the administrators and merchants who carried, say, the woollen goods produced in temple factories (which in the very earliest period were at least partly charitable enterprises, homes for orphans, refugees or disabled people for instance) and traded them to faraway lands for metal, timber, or lapis lazuli. The first markets form on the fringes of these complexes and appear to operate largely on credit, using the temples’ units of account. But this gave the merchants and temple administrators and other well-off types the opportunity to make consumer loans to farmers, and then, if say the harvest was bad, everybody would start falling into debt-traps.

This was the great social evil of antiquity – families would have to start pawning off their flocks, fields and before long, their wives and children would be taken off into debt peonage. Often people would start abandoning the cities entirely, joining semi-nomadic bands, threatening to come back in force and overturn the existing order entirely. Rulers would regularly conclude the only way to prevent complete social breakdown was to declare a clean slate or ‘washing of the tablets,’ they’d cancel all consumer debt and just start over. In fact, the first recorded word for ‘freedom’ in any human language is the Sumerian amargi, a word for debt-freedom, and by extension freedom more generally, which literally means ‘return to mother,’ since when they declared a clean slate, all the debt peons would get to go home.

Also this:

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

Now there's a concept that seems entirely human, yet any modern day capitalist would retch at the thought of debt foregiveness.  They'd rather drag the tribe or even the species down first.  Wonder how long before the "nomadic bands threaten to come back in force and overturn the existing order entirely".  Jubilee, jubilation, now.  Do read the interview.

I've been thinking about a move to Reykjavik, jolly one. Spent quite a bit of time exploring it via The Google.

Gotta admire a small, independent country willing to thumb it's nose at global corporatism. It's The Mouse That Roared turned upside down.

But the drag is, half of my income these days consists of repayments of my paid-in benefits into Social Security and Medicare, and the Medicare disappears if I move to Iceland.

Maybe we should do what Dean Baker has long advocated, let U.S. Medicare pay for procedures in foreign countries. The USA would benefit from lower costs, and folks like me could be long gone and no longer a political millstone around the neck of the likes of Rick Perry.