Oddbean

What if usury isn't bad? Rent is bad in excess. No one wants to get rid of rent. Business loans at interest are justifiable. Mortgages at interest are justifiable. Auto loans at interest are justifiable. People talking about a flat rate agreed to up front are creating something indistinguishable from a fixed-rate loan and that puts a burden on the creditor. What if there's nothing bad with loaning at interest and what's bad are exploitative loans at interest just like there can be exploitative rent or property consolidation or retail prices?

@Griffith @Godcast (GOWAD half) >Rent is bad in excess. No one wants to get rid of rent. :aniwhat: "Landlords make huge piles of money by doing functionally nothing" is one of the *very* few valid criticisms commies make. I don't know anyone who would be sympathetic to Blackrock. Most people are totally happy with the notion that home ownership should be the standard, the only people who disagree with this are kikes. >Mortgages at interest are justifiable. Auto loans at interest are justifiable. We should be able to build houses on land that's passed down from our ancestors. Cars should be a rarity, and public transit should be the norm (as it is in every country that is developed). >Business loans at interest are justifiable. This is the only point you're making which has validity. One might argue that it is better for such loans to be made by the government - at zero interest, as the government has an interest in building a functional economy. Even if you don't quite buy that, it's sufficient to show that stamping out loans with interest is feasible, even if it requires a radically different system from ours. >What if there's nothing bad with loaning at interest and what's bad are exploitative loans at interest just like there can be exploitative rent or property consolidation or retail prices? The point is that loaning at interest is so often exploitative that one should think about why. For example, smoking tobacco is usually unhealthy - we condemn the practice as a whole, and we make exceptions where applicable.

You’re asking for a fairy world. Most people in history haven’t owned the land they live on. Most people would simply not own property without mortgages and would pay rent to someone hindering their ability to save. America is the exception. Rome had widespread White slavery. Some people owned their land, a lot of them rented. The model of the yeoman farmer, the homesteader, and eventually the homeowner are unique in history. There isn’t free land out west so a loan is how people are going to buy their property for the foreseeable future. Interest is needed because of the time value of money, and a zero interest government loan means the government will lose money, so I can only assume you are a money-printing enjoyer who lives in America and takes the fed for granted. Otherwise you would just pay for that with taxes lol. There’s a lot that goes into these decisions, and it’s not that the banks aren’t exploitative, but banking is needed because money isn’t free and sometimes people need it now rather than later. You intuitively understand why a business loan is fair, you probably get why a mortgage is fair same for a car loan. It’s just bad optics to say, “the investment is worth the interest, the loan is good.” It’s not like people get dragged off to the salt mines when they can’t pay either, they just can’t borrow as much in the future, in America. Now, is credit abused? Do institutions such as credit card companies incentivize it to be abused? Sure, but it’s like saying building an apartment with units to rent out is bad because in the 17th century Ukrainians lived on Polish lands paying rent to nobles they’d never see who used jews as middlemen to extract as much wealth as they could from them.

@Griffith @Godcast (GOWAD half) For most of history you could literally go out into the middle of fucking nowhere and build a house, and the government couldn't/wouldn't do jack shit about it. In what way is that "not owning a house"? This wasn't just true in the US, either - there's been uninhabited land all over. >Interest is needed because of the time value of money, and a zero interest government loan means the government will lose money, The government can expect a profitable business to pay both the loan and tax back later. In a scenario where our country is not run by the malicious or by idiots, this is a solid way to net the government money. Now, would I trust *our* government to implement such policies well? No, it's run by a bunch of kikes! However, other countries could implement such policies well. >Now, is credit abused? Do institutions such as credit card companies incentivize it to be abused? Sure, but it’s like saying building an apartment with units to rent out is bad because in the 17th century Ukrainians lived on Polish lands paying rent to nobles they’d never see who used jews as middlemen to extract as much wealth as they could from them. Wow, it sounds exactly like our current situation, except the jews are not *just* the middlemen here.