Father John Jimenez has been a priest of the Archdiocese of San Francisco for 26 years, involved in parishes and schools from St Pius to Church of the Visitacion, to St Peter's and St Charles to Riordan High School. Previous to that he was a public school teacher in Oakland.
In a recent essay "The Ascent of Money and the Pound of Flesh", Fr Jimenez summarizes Niall Ferguson's with allusions to venture capitalist Marc Andreeson's recent essay detailing positive aspects of tech innovations through history, while Ferguson brilliantly makes the analogy of historical finance innovations with anthropologist Bronkowski's "The Ascent of Man", from early civilization when humans settled and grew crops, and kept an accounting for trade on stone tablets and the first use of language, to Fibonacci's number theory and the use of Sanskrit and Arabic to simplify and improve the number system, and more accurate, through decimals, accounting system that allowed the rise of the Medicis and the first banking system, particularly a more extensive system of loaning money (even fractional reserve), fiat money even, that allowed a multiplier effect in economic growth and technological innovation that feeds each others growth, and in general, a rising tide lifting all boats.
Yet, Ferguson does describe the essence of Shakespeare's point in "The Merchant of Venice", that ultimately, a system of debt risks collapsing unless there is a "Pound of Flesh", the story where a merchant lends money for Antonio's friend to win over the beloved and Antonio helps by borrowing money, the ships that he owns as collateral, and "his own flesh", his life, if the loan cannot be repaid.
The story illustrates at the local level that a debt system can only function when the risk ensued, if there is no payback on a loan, is enforced by the debtor losing all that they have, even their life, "contracts enforced", or even, the role of mafia hitmen. Ferguson does point out the Medici's origin were as loan sharks.
Add to this David Stockman's insight in his essay "War Machine's Echoe Chamber", war has been the loan sharking hitman of the rise of empires, loans allow economies to grow and tech to innovate, but war becomes the method of imposing the currency of the dominant power on those colonized, controlling production, wages and prices.
As an example, Ferguson describes, at the war and supply level, the rise of Napoleon and his defeat by Ellington at Waterloo. The ideology of the French Revolution of "Liberte" evolved into a cabal holding onto power through the constant threat of arrest and violence (the guillotine), and found that expanding this violence into empire building, fiat money financed military expeditions and opening of new markets and colonies, Ferguson then describes the rise of the Rothschild banks, in centers of trade throughout Europe, especially London, were in key positions to take advantage of the change in prices in supply lines, and in currencies, to finance the innovation, and their banks to be the first globalist empire, able to expand it's economic power through it's colonies, the enforcement of which, the pound of flesh, being it's conflict with the rise of Germany, which became WWI.
The folly of ideology and empire is expressed in three Beethoven symphonies, The Third, which expresses hope in "Liberte" in Napoleon's coronation, The Fifth, the realization of the horror of the war machine that war is, and the moral decision to oppose at a deep, existential level, and The Seventh, looking at the fields of the dead at Waterloo, the peasants who paid the price of for empire and ideology.
In response to this devastation, and the conjunctional role of technology in displacing peasants and families in the 19th Century, Pope Leo XIII wrote "Rerum Novarum", which illustrates principles found in Aristotle, of power distributed and decision making at the local level, and the primary role of family, and guilds of workers and craftsmen to set fair prices and wages, local credit unions for enterprises to grow (and not money accumulated into a few hands to corner markets and fuel empire building) all of which can be found in Revelation in how our Lord grew up in Nazareth.
Yet, WWI, which has set the geopolitics of today, only repeated the same empire/pound of flesh mentality, and the suffering of peasants, families and villages caught in the middle. So, many more came to realize Pope Leo's insight, which could be called Distributism; Hillarie Belloc, GK Chesterton, Dorothy Day, Alexander Chayonov, Karl Polyani, Wendell Berry, Pope Pius XI and Pope John Paul II.
For a summary of these ideas and how they were lived out in the 20th Century, Allan Carlson's "Third Ways" (ISI Books) gives a good description of what has been done and what is possible, so that there are no more Waterloo wastelands, and like TS Eliot, let "The Wasteland" be our motivation to live the truth manifested at Bethlehem, and lived at Nazareth