Wealth & Money Quote by Dudley North

North is doing something radical for a 17th-century Englishman: he’s stripping moral theater out of credit and treating it as plumbing. The line lands like a rebuttal to a familiar sermon of the era: don’t “buy at time” (purchase on credit at inflated prices), just borrow money “at interest” and pay cash like a virtuous soul. North’s cool answer is basically: nice idea, but where are the lenders?

The intent is practical, almost impatient. He’s calling out the lazy policy habit of prescribing “better” behavior without building the institutions that make it possible. Credit isn’t conjured by scolding; it’s produced by confidence. If you want borrowers to switch from messy, informal trade credit to clean money loans, you need people willing to lend and a state capable of supplying a credible “Fund to borrow upon” - a secure public revenue stream, enforceable contracts, and predictable repayment. Otherwise, the market falls back to the workaround: buying on time, which is credit disguised as commerce and often more expensive precisely because it’s riskier and harder to enforce.

The subtext is a defense of interest-taking as normal, even socially useful, at a moment when “usury” still carried theological stink. North’s point isn’t that the legislature should micromanage prices; it’s that public authority has one indispensable job in a credit economy: make trust legible. In the post-Restoration world, edging toward public finance and nascent capital markets, he’s arguing that moral preferences don’t beat liquidity constraints. Institutions do.