Wealth & Money Quote by William Petty

Petty is doing something quietly radical here: laundering what had long been treated as a moral vice into a practical fee. In 17th-century England, “usury” still carried the stink of sin and social predation, even as commerce demanded credit. Petty’s sentence turns the whole argument sideways. He doesn’t celebrate lenders as virtuous; he reframes lending as self-imposed inconvenience. If you voluntarily tie up your money “until a certain time to come,” you’ve accepted a constraint. “Compensation” becomes not greed but reimbursement for lost options.

The intent is surgical: legitimize interest by rooting it in time, not theology. Petty’s diction matters. “Wherefore” signals a proof, not a plea. “Certainly may” reads like courtroom language, a claim of right. He smuggles in the key premise of modern finance: liquidity has value. Money now is not the same as money later because the present holds choices - insurance against surprise expenses, the ability to seize an opportunity, the simple comfort of flexibility. Interest is priced freedom.

The subtext is also political. Petty, an early architect of “political arithmetic,” is trying to make economic life legible in neutral, almost mechanical terms. By describing the lender as someone who “admits against himself” an inconvenience, he flips the moral sympathy from borrower to lender. That move doesn’t erase exploitation, but it does redraw the baseline: interest isn’t inherently theft; it’s the cost of time-bound trust in a world where time is never free.