Well on this thread you're the one banging on the pulpit.
I never said I wasn't, it's myrkul who needs to defend this absurd claim that the rest of 'you' and 'Austrians' broadly are not operating out of a moralistic framework that rationalizes usury by defining the lender as morally virtuous and the borrower as morally flawed.
Economics is value-free. Borrowers are not "bad" and savers are not "good". If you want to argue about "usury", do it in the religious section.
Anyone claiming that their ideology is value free is either ignorant or ashamed of the values it actually carries. Nothing made by man is free of value judgments, especially economics. You would have to be the most blindly obtuse person ever born to think that Marx-vs-Adam Smith or hard-vs-soft money or the Keynes-vs-Hayek debates are value-free, it is saturated with value judgments. These are indeed some of the most pivotal value debates that have existed in the last century.
You're projecting, my friend. Your use of the word "usury" indicates that
you make a value judgment on interest, and because Austrian theory provides a valid explanation for why interest happens, you assume that we take the opposite position, and are
defending interest. That's absurd. We are explaining it, as a natural part of the economy, the price of money. But because you view it as bad, we who do not agree with you must therefore view it as good. It's not bad, it's not good. It just is.
Now, the interest rate can tell us a great deal about the underlying economy, but only if it is left, like other prices, to float in the marketplace.