Wealth & Money Quote by John Buchanan Robinson

Robinson slips a radical idea into a sentence that reads like bookkeeping: money, he implies, is not a sacred substance but a tool, and like any tool it can be rented. That quiet comparison does a lot of political work. It demystifies “interest” by yanking it out of the moral and theological arguments that used to cling to lending and placing it in the plain world of contracts: you hire a horse, a house, a worker’s time; you can hire capital, too.

The intent is stabilizing and legitimizing. A politician making this move is trying to make modern finance sound not only normal but inevitable, especially in an era when industrial economies depended on credit to build railways, factories, and municipal infrastructure. By defining interest as “hire,” Robinson frames it as payment for use, not exploitation for existence. That matters because the older critique of interest isn’t just economic; it’s ethical: earning money from money feels like getting something for nothing. “Hire” answers that accusation with a commonsense analogy: use has a cost.

The subtext is also a defense of the creditor’s role. If money can be “hired,” then the lender is not a parasite but a supplier, providing access to an asset someone else doesn’t currently have. At the same time, the phrasing hints at the politics of who gets to do the hiring. If interest is rent, then questions about fair rates, monopoly power, and unequal bargaining aren’t erased; they’re simply reframed as the familiar disputes we already have over rent, wages, and terms.