A remarkable opinion piece published Aug. 22, by Paul Vigna, managing editor of the American Banker, in the New York Times under the title “An Ancient Sumerian Solution to Our $40 Trillion Deficit” underlines (without mentioning LaRouche’s historical fight on the subject), that debt cancellation, so far considered the absolute crime by monetarism, in reality is precisely what allowed humanity to survive over time.
Vigna reminds his readers: “The ancient world had a different understanding of the nature of money, which is why debt forgiveness became a standard feature of their cultures.” While leaving out the more recent case of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia (which included selective cancellations of war debt), Vigna cites the well known case of Sumer, which this author and other LaRouche associates have thoroughly documented.
“The ancient Mesopotamians are credited with inventing money,” Vigna writes. “They invented loans and compound interest. They understood this system and its propensity for breakdowns when debts spiraled. That’s why they invented something else, too. About 4,400 years ago, a Mesopotamian king named Enmetena issued an edict: Essentially all public debts, he declared, were canceled … People who had been sold into bondage were freed. Similar edicts gave back land to farmers who had lost it to creditors.”
The word for these cancellations, amargi—"return to mother”—is, Vigna notes, essentially the Sumerian word for freedom.
“People who were owed money were, predictably, not always happy … In Athens, the ruler Solon instituted a series of reforms around 594 B.C. that canceled debts. The changes were bitterly opposed by the ruling elite.”
