ABSTRACT
The chapter details about Forced debts. The kinds of debts referred to in the Bible were usually forced debts: debts that people had to take on due to events beyond their control. Extractive lending thus has the very opposite effect of productive usury. It transfers wealth from those who have the best uses for it - who need it the most - to those who need it less - who are wealthy already. Extractive usury can thus be rejected on the same Humean-Anscombean grounds for which productive usury is praised. Bentham proposes a weak argument in favour of lending to 'indigents' - those forced to borrow out of extreme poverty. Cobbett believed in a kind of Gresham's Law of Debt, where forced debt tended to drive out good, voluntary, productive debt. Thus these commentators observed debt as a general institution, including the debt that governments can force upon their citizens, possessing a tendency to become extractive and unsustainable.
