The Illegitimate Sovereign

Tired of this Wolff guy, but I can't diss Hall so easy. It's microhistory. His specific date of 2400 BCE is too neat and sharp and unsupported. What IS supported is the macrohistorical pattern: private creditors and public issuers have been in structural tension since the earliest recorded economies.

JC is in the Temple.
2400 BCE is an interpretive claim, a rhetorical flourish instead of a documented event. Even so, the presence of private bankers and credit systems are documented. So is the struggle between moneylenders and public currency-issuers all the way back into the Bronze Age. Call the former "private credit actors". The Bronze Age is called the Archaic Age. Fast forward past 1200 BCE, the start of the Iron Age, to the Classical period (5th–4th century BCE), when private bankers were financing commercial ventures, managing risk, and lending capital. Archaeology suggests similar market structures existed centuries earlier in the Aegean Bronze Age.
This matches Hall’s thesis: private credit emerges early and becomes structurally powerful. Those ever-loving PUBLIC AUTHORITIES (an important macrohistorical category) were issuing ration-credits, temple credits, and later, coinage. Not everything began with the ancient Greeks (except the way they asked questions, much like ours). Sumerian temples issued grain credits and labor claims. Egyptian state granaries issued ration‑based compensation. (Hey, that Jiang fellow claims that the Egyptian 5-soul model is an inadvertent glimpse at how priests put the Pharaoh in a dissociative state so they could control him.) Bronze Age palaces issued accounting‑unit credits. Greek poleis minted coinage for public works. (They really loved their poleis. They were unable to extend their loyalties to anything higher. More about communities meeting human needs later.) Rome minted state currency to pay soldiers and contractors. That's how it got circulated among the rest of society.
As soon as states began issuing public claims on resources, private creditors began issuing competing claims — and the two systems have been in tension ever since.
Three rusty nails. To hear Xns now, they'd recrucify Him for reminding them.
Hall's allegiance to MMT must have started here. His model is essentially that public money = claims issued by the sovereign (another macrohistorical concept badly-bent by the Yarvin cabal) to mobilize real resources. Private money = claims issued by creditors to extract future surplus. Also known as rent. Believe it or not, Adam Smith hated rent. Careful, libertarians might crucify him, too.
The goals of these two coexistent systems are very different. Public issuance is for building infrastructure, armies, temples, ports. I keep thinking that "spend first → tax later is an emergent property of money that was discovered after the West shifted explicitly to fiat currency. Evidently I'm wrong. Now private lending's goal is to accumulate wealth via interest. Its private mechanism is lend first → collect later.
Hall argues that every civilization cycles through periods in which:
1️⃣ Public issuance expands (temples, canals, armies, roads)...
2️⃣ Private creditors gain power (debt peonage, foreclosure, oligarchy)...
3️⃣ The two systems clash (debt jubilees, revolts, reforms, coinage changes).
This is why he sees the conflict as civilizational, not merely economic.
The macrohistorical fit is very close. His date corresponds to Dynastic Sumer. This era witnessed the rise of temple-palace accounting systems, the earliest known debt crises (Ur, Lagash), and the first recorded debt cancellations (Enmetena, Urukagina).
Jubilees!
History isn't really about the sound of trumpets but what is behind them. Sumerian temple credit vs private barley lenders. Old Babylonian debt crises and royal clean‑slates. Greek public coinage vs private banking houses. Roman fiscal coinage vs private usury.
Now you will know who AOC's assassin will be paid by.
And the right-wing dolts will be complicit in their own doom...as always.

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