It is incredible to know what Dante thought about Usury all those hundreds of years ago, thanks Jared, I was a philistine of his at least, not knowing that :)
And he was so right, it has become a word that offends the most influential so use of it has become almost unheard of.
Even more amazing are his observations of the relationships between the study of physics, nature, and art.
That philosophy explains maybe a little of the talent of Da Vinci, a couple of hundred years later.
We stopped aspiring to that, about the same time as we became sensitive to the word Usury, commodifying even education, I think.
But something masked a little by the observation that the usual role of government and maybe some religions, to keep folk in a constant state of terror, is the cry-wolf effect.
We can fall into the false assumption that when real physical existential danger comes along, even the real biblical end of days, everyone with any common sense already "Knows" to just ignore warnings claiming it, we've heard all these threats a thousand times over, have we not.
The commodification of education does not help anyone discriminate actual existential hazard, from just more wolf cries.
But there are some disciplines that cut through this, one being multisciolinary systems Engineering, which folk should recognise is very powerful, if that is used to show there is actually a constant depletion of energy directly driving temperature rise which underlies all things including even the value of money, which has happened in all our history of being exclusively physically powered from the energy of Earth, and that this is delivering to us all the indications of being the real physical end of days, warned of by religions, the ultimate price of ignoring all the warnings, by constantly robbing the energy from the planet (the action of profit is to present the energy robbed as a kind of miracle, see how money makes money, when the energy comes from the planet all along), the real danger is we could throw that analysis aside, believing it to be just another religious or authoritarian wolf cry.
This is where I see things right now, being a Systems Engineer who has done this analysis, and have been trying to flag up, yet nobody seems to understand it enough to know it is the physical truth, this time we really are at the end of the physical run of living from the energy of Earth.
Not accepting that, means little to no chance either of understanding the only solution, which is fully dictated by the problem - to stop using the energy of Earth, and to start using the only energy supplying Earth, the sun.
We can only do that by changing what money represents (stored energy), to live energy, which only comes from the sun. So money needs to become something continuously issued, at a rate proportional to the rate of energy being put to use from the sun.
That means a solar indexed UBI for all people.
This is the only way out!
Meanwhile, until or if we do that, we have to watch the value in money (effective energy content) decline whilst it becomes more and more used as a weapon, not a benefit to anyone, just something used to enforce scarcity.
It has to be used as the opposite to regain value.
That happens almost instantly on issue of massive stimulus, as we've seen, along with a number of other previously unheard of miracles, including genuine environmental recovery, and oil prices going negative, the rescuing of truly beneficial companies and products by the public trading (voting!) with free money, which are actually fully explainable by the System Analysis, showing it is simply monetisation of the outstanding product created by use of solar energy continuously accumulating, which had never previously been monetised, because it was for free, nothing was asked for it by the sun, other than we use it wisely, money issued as debt, or for any return at all, can never monetise it.
Thanks for your really valuable article prompting me to reply Jared.