Oh, you libertarian, you! Actually, I find this answer... curious. In a way, I like the concept..LOL Don't think the banks would like that much though.

@omicron, I think you might have been thinking of the concept of "Jubilee" which is based on Hebrew and Christian tradition and celebrated every 50 years. Debts are forgiven and the slate is wiped clean in both the financial and spiritual senses. I have a feeling that Jubilee is not really celebrated much these days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee

Okay, I just checked the Old Testament, and you're right, it was not 70 years, it was once every 50 years when there would be a year of Jubilee, where what was at that time the key means of production, lands, would be reset to their historical ownerships insolong as a descendant was willing to go back and work it. Basically, it's was a way of making inheritance of land independent of other obligations.

It was every *seventh* year that ordinary financial debts were to be erased, including up to the point where a slave had to be given the option of going free, unless they wanted to stay for another seven years.

I've studied enough math and how compound interest works to know that actually, if you leave capitalism combined with interest-bearing loans alone, then eventually, it has to happen that one person ends up owning everything, as a mathematical inevitability, so it makes a lot of sense if you want to have long term social stability in the context of private ownership of things that can make other things (i.e. land that can make food... aka a means of production) combined with a lending system that charges interest, so... hmm... you know what it means... it means nations based upon capitalism and interest-bearing loans can survive and be stable as long as they are christian and/or Jewish enough to actually live by their tenets.

Hmm... further thoughts, and to clarify. When I talk about the problem of the issue of compounding interest, it's like that old parable about a guy who's owed some money by the Chinese emperor, and so the emperor asks him how much he wants, and so the sage says that he wants rice, of the amount of one grain on the first square of chess board, two grains on the next square, four grains on the third square, eight grains on the fourth square... until by the end of the board you've got 2*(2^64)/2 grains of rice, or about as many grains of rice as there atoms in the known universe. I read a psychology study once that said the two hardest concepts for humans to get is 1) when to cut your losses and run, and 2) the concept of compound interest.

What it means is that supposed you've got a system where the only means of production is land, and it's possible for it to be owned by one person, then if the land makes more food than they need then they sell the surplus for money, and after they've bought all the cloths and shoes and wine they can consume, there's nothing left to spend the money on other than more land, so they buy it from kids who've inherited it and don't want to work it, or widows so poor that they need the money, but because it's land, it's not just another possession... it's something that makes more wealth, and you already had more than you could consume, so all you can do with the profits from that is buy more land, which makes more money, until one day you run into someone else doing the same thing, and whichever the two of you had more money buys the other out, and one person is left owning not just everything, but everything from which everything that is new wealth new can be grown.

The way most nations deal with that dilemma is with taxes in order to cap it and level it out, because if one guy ends up owning everything, including the ability to grow more food, things like revolutions tend to happen, but if believers really stuck to the principals of those old-time Old Testament rules of Sabbath Years and Jubilee years, then governments wouldn't need to think about useing things like taxes to try and balance out the natural mathematical conundrum of the effects of compounding interest on loans and profits and what to do with those surplus profits other than reinvest it to own land that makes more surplus production... and around and around it goes...

It means ol' Moses there was perfectly aware of the issues and what kind of situation's could arise, and so he wrote up some rules to keep things from getting out of hand, by having everything reset periodically.

We should have capitalist games, where at the end of seven years, the son who's accumulated the greatest capitalistic wealth before debts are reset gets some kind of honor, like... instant jump forward to retirement on the Bahamas with a stipend enough to keep him in margaritas all day every day... it would totally be cheaper that what it costs to maintain the super-rich now, who just want to sit in the sun in the Bahamas and be waited on while they drink margaritas and bitch about welfare bums living off the work of others...