In the free market, interest originates neither in bankers' greed, nor in political manipulations, nor in inflation. (Inflation and its relationship to interest will be examined in a later subsection.) Nor is interest a "crime against nature," as medieval theologians declared. Interest is simply a natural consequence of the fact that human beings act in order to achieve ends and that they therefore do not defer the attainment of those ends without compensating benefit. A person may choose to offer an interest-free loan to a friend or an organization considered worthy; such a loan is then in part a gift, from which the lender derives psychic value. Outside of such special situations, to force a lender to lend a value without interest would be to require him or her to sacrifice a higher value for a lower one.