Delphic Maxim 117: Acquire wealth justly
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
117. Acquire wealth justly
When I read Dante’s Inferno as part of a great books project with my flatmate, one of the things that struck me was how deep into hell he cast usurers. These are people who lend money and charge super high rates of interest, or who make their living by exploiting the borrowing of others. They’re bankers, basically, or probably more accurately loan sharks.
It’s pretty timely, at least in Australia. We recently had a banking royal commission report back on the dodgy practices of financial institutions in this country, and the findings were pretty damning (cheesy pun intended). But even the legal practices are still ethically dubious! The people to whom banks will continue to lend money, the ease with which credit can be made available, the interest rates charged on credit cards — all of these things are a systematic exploitation of vulnerable, needy or financially illiterate people.
Of course the response from some commentators was that people choose to take these services, so it’s their own fault — which is a fairly clinical, heartless approach. It may be objectively true, but it isn’t a moral argument: it’s an unjust one, which is why I think this maxim gives us scope to think about our financial systems and the economic structure of our society.
Capitalism isn’t inherently evil. This is a controversial position for someone like me — a creature of the left — to take. I think that properly regulated, it is a dynamic, innovative and wealth-producing system. It has lifted millions of people out of poverty, commerce has spurred our technological development, and trade has driven cultural exchange for thousands of years. But at the same time, it is a system filled with contradiction, and some of those contradictions are getting stress-tested at the moment.
The wealth creation machine is driving up the cost of everything. The ‘neoliberal’ trend towards privatisation of public services, which started in the 1970’s and continues albeit at a slower pace today, has some harmful side-effects. Things that people need to live comfortably in our world — water, electricity, homes — cost a lot of money because of monopolistic businesses. And if the pace of wage and jobs growth doesn’t keep up, then people begin to live off credit. And that empowers banks.
So I suppose my reflection on this maxim isn’t one for individuals, except to consider how our social systems work for or against members of our community. And if you happen to be the CEO of a big bank, I understand your need to make money for shareholders, and that banks operate within a particular economy. But nothing we do should be unjust (Plato loathed the idea of money governing a society), so ethical choices should always come before profit.
