Bernard Lietaer, former senior officer of the Belgian Central Bank and one of the chief architects of the Euro currency, in his book, Of Human Wealth, says that greed and fear of scarcity are programmed; they do not exist in nature, not even in human nature.

Anthropologists no longer accept that money originated to replace barter, as classical economists, including Smith, had maintained. There is no evidence for this barter-to-money myth. On the contrary, it seems likely that credit antedated money and that the earliest forms of credit bore interest.

Another way was to broaden the notion of debt, so that all social responsibilities become debts of one sort or another.

As a result, the old puritanical notion that debt was sin and degradation began to take a profound hold on many of those who came to consider themselves the “respectable” working classes, who often took freedom from the clutches of the pawnbroker and loan shark as a point of pride, which separated them from drunkards, hustlers, and ditch-diggers as