Editorial: The infamous 18% interest rate
Translated by Lydia Ma
An old 77 year old man is seen selling magnolias under a freeway overpass near Kaohsiung. On a placard in front of him are scribbled the words “I don’t have 18%, so I sell magnolias to make a living.” Not only is this old fellow venting his anger at the controversial 18% preferential interest rate retired civil servants receive on their pensions, he’s also clever in manipulating controversy to his advantage.
From a Christian perspective, life is often full of unreasonable and unfair things and the call of every Christian throughout history has been to promote justice as part of advancing God’s kingdom on earth.
The preferential 18% interest rate that retired teachers, veterans, and civil servants receive is a historical relic and a reflection of an era from which we’ve recently emerged from that included many ludicrous things that benefited the rich and the powerful. But it’s one thing to criticize an unfair phenomenon, and quite another thing to use it to attack another person to advance self-interests.
When the richest 5% in Taiwan’s population are 66 times richer than the poorest 5%, it’s no wonder that Taiwanese people at the bottom of this economic food-chain hate veterans, civil servants, and public school teachers for having a preferential interest rate. But this fury should be directed at an unfair system promoted by the KMT government instead of targeting it towards recipients of this preferential treatment.
Besides advocating for righteousness and justice through various movements, churches can also learn a lot from history and from role models such as Nobel Peace Prize 2006 laureate Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank. Both were awarded the prize “for their efforts to create economic and social development from below”.
Yunus founded a bank in 1976 that lent money to women living in the village of Jobra, Bangladesh, at a much lower interest rate than average lenders. As of 2004, millions of women in Bangladesh were able to make a living, raise a family, and succeed in life because of such low-interest loans.
In contrast, the KMT that fled China in defeat and ruled over Taiwan afterwards and throughout the past 50 years except for a brief 8-year lapse brought with it corruption and immorality and influenced and stained Taiwanese culture.
As the Church, we have a responsibility to make these customs a relic of the past so that, as Yunus once said, future generations will only see poverty inside museums.
Jesus himself showed us how God feels about corruption when he overturned the tables of moneychangers in the courtyard of God’s temple in Jerusalem and stopped a corrupt system that bullied the masses. His feeding of thousands shortly after this incident also shows us what and who he prioritized.
