4 ms·
A big part of the reason that nothing ever changes is because it isn't profitable for things to change, at least not when some moneyed interests can make a prof
by matthewdgreen 6y ago
A big part of the reason that nothing ever changes is because it isn't profitable for things to change, at least not when some moneyed interests can make a profit doing things like predatory lending and others get to have cheap employees.
In other words, the lack of a social safety net isn't just some accident that citizens blundered into. It was engineered and continues to be advanced by the people who make money from it.
- refurb 6y agoThis is a dumb take. Canada has a very cushy social safety net and still has payday lending with interest rates of 49%. And the alternative of having payday lending is no lending - that is, these folks would have no way of getting a short term loan. Is that better?
- Scoundreller 6y ago> Is that better? Usually.
- arcticbull 6y agoIndeed if payday lenders are profitable then they are extracting welfare from the worst off.
- refurb 6y agoHuh? If the poor by Apple phone is able extracting welfare from them?
- matthewdgreen 6y agoI think there's a middle ground between "unrestricted predatory lending" and short term lending. The payday loan industry spends a lot of money on lobbying to push things to the former end (see attached article about 1000% interest rates), and have been very successful [1]. (But the overall lack of a social safety net in the US is due to moneyed interests that go well beyond the payday loan industry.) Yours is a typical HN binary take that holds a thing must be an utterly unalloyed good or it must be banned, there's no middle ground for a thing to be useful when moderated and regulated, and predatory in other circumstances. This is a very common intellectual failure mode. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/us/politics/payday-lenders-lobbying-regulations.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/us/politics/payday-lender...