I return from trying and failing to sleep to share an unrelated small point about the new law stuff. Evidently it also includes a cap on interest rate for student loans. The thought came up to me, while musing that it'd be fucking nice if this concept was applied to all types of loans to put a dent in the universal practice of predatory lending, that this is the first time I can recall seeing anything resembling an anti-usury law implemented in the US (note this is probably not actually the first law or even fragment of a law that could warrant the term but it's like almost 3 AM and brain scrambled egg right now due to IRL stress).
So the word usury comes to mind and that means it's time for another antiquity and/or medieval history and/or religious history shitpost, now with 200% more 3 AM brain. Historically, usury was rather frowned upon. To cover the theological bit of today's history trivia in brief:
If thou lend money to any of My people, even to the poor with thee, thou shalt not be to him as a creditor; neither shall ye lay upon him interest. If thou at all take thy neighbour’s garment to pledge, thou shalt restore it unto him by that the sun goeth down; for that is his only covering, it is his garment for his skin; wherein shall he sleep? and it shall come to pass, when he crieth unto Me, that I will hear; for I am gracious.
With the obligatory "oops Rome kicked everyone's asses, spread the Jewish people and their weird martyr-worshiping relatives across the empire, and now the latter is doing that weird monotheist thing that made Rome so asskick-happy last time" period out of the way, early christianity latched onto the idea that all interest was usury, and that all usury was bad, by about the 300s or so. The council of Nicea, important as it was for a lot of "making emperor Constantine happy so he'll keep our religion legalized" reasons, one of the things to come up was the idea that clergy were forbidden from charging interest.
Later on they'd go on to say that this applies to the laity. This a fancy way of saying, effectively: "Remember how Jesus said you can't serve God and money? Let's take a trip down memory lane." Bonus points for making the modern CEO cry (if they had tear ducts), in 1311 the council of Vienne went so far as to say that belief in the right to usury is full-on heresy. The virgin "outlawing the right to not bleed out from a miscarriage" vs the chad "outlawing the right to be a loan shark", because business ethics does not exist.
Meanwhile on the other major branch of Rome's unending struggle against monotheism, Judaism weathered the bullshit long enough for the Empire to regard them as a traditional religion by the time Constantine's immediate predecessor came around, thus letting them enjoy The Comedy of Emperor Diocletian The Jovian:
However, one constant point of disagreement kept popping up every so often: usury is bad, but is it bad all the time or only bad when done to fellow victims of Roman fuckery? Those who remember previous episodes will recall that Diocletion's wrath found a target that had spend the past century or two vigorously distancing itself from Judaism. As you can probably guess, every time the question came up and:
1. Someone decided to answer "no"
2. That someone had a job that let them actually charge interest.
3. No one derailed things with the third answer of "hey wait technically they're also victims of Roman fuckery"
Cue a now-infamous stereotype being talked about by the errant former hippie offshoot of the Roman Fuckery Cinematic Universe since they were usually in charge by now, violence ensues, rinse and repeat. And whoever survives learns zero lessons, when both "usury is usury" and "Abrahamic is Abrahamic" were on the table. You may complete this for me by making the "Mr. Incredible yelling X is X" meme of your choice.
As for how to wrap this pile of useless trivia into finally explaining how we got to the corporate hellscape we live in now? Uh...either the pope being too busy screaming at a disgruntled German man to scream about other heresy, people finding loopholes that let them discover that investments actually do kinda help for megaprojects despite the Egyptian method of throwing beer at peasants in the summertime being infinitely more based, or blame the Knights Templar being accused of assimilating muslim practices as a way to get their shit stolen by the king of France. Probably 1d3 of those.
As I now really need to go the fuck to sleep and we're dipping into post-medieval history where I'm not an infinite wellspring of useless trivia, I'll have to conclude things with the above cliffhanger. Tune in next time for why mangled French gave edgy teenagers a fictional name for Satan. Hint: it involves the king of France stealing shit.
EDIT: In lieu of going the fuck to sleep, I took the above joking suggestion of "make your own X is X meme" and made this mangled combination shitpost:
Will give you a history shitpost on the Knights Templar after I've had some actual sleep.