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>* Allows you to get a mortgage Simply the base artifact of modern finance. Why do I need a mortgage? (hint: to supply interest payments to banks AKA the insti

>* Allows you to get a mortgage Simply the base artifact of modern finance. Why do I need a mortgage? (hint: to supply interest payments to banks AKA the institutors of the world of modern finance) >* Allows you to protect yourself with health/car/life/home/title/etc insurance See above. >* Pays for your highways/stadiums/schools and other public works "Pays". A meaningless word. >* Protects your deposits Only through magic. If deposits are lost, they are merely re-created as modern finance is an arbitrary mathematical construct. >* Pays for your retirement "Pays for your retirement" >* Funds the college fund that paid for your school "Funds the fund" that "paid". Again, meaningless except insofar as your school depends on magic numbers being circulated. >* ... Or the student loans that allowed you to attend school Ah, yes, the loans; again, the foundational unit of modern finance, without which the "world of finance" would be radically different. >* Supports the global supply chain that brings you your iPhone, stocks the grocery store/your favorite restaurants with food, and puts the clothes on your back. Supports in name, but is curiously not actually involved in any physical aspect of realizing any of those things. >* Funds the growth of corporations large and small, giving you the job that allows you to buy an iPhone "Funds" ... "giving [me] the job" >* Funds the massive philanthropy expenditures that help those in need everyday "Funds", because the actual work is done by real people. >* Pays the pensions of the elderly I guess the system isn't complete evil.

bluedevil2k 11y ago
You need a mortgage because you don't have $400,000 in cash sitting around. You need insurance because you don't have the personal finances to adequately cover the risk of "life"
- alextgordon 11y ago
  If we live in a democracy, and money is backed by the state, why do we have to pay interest to profit-making banks and insurance companies? Giving out mortgages is not difficult. You just have to be a bank. Not only that but 2007 showed that profit-making banks are even worse than a reasonable person, or precocious five year old, would be at deciding who should be given a mortgage. Mortgages are a necessary part of society. Profit-making banks are not. The only reason you spend your life slaving away paying extra interest to the shareholders of banks, is because banks have manoeuvred themselves into a privileged position. Inequality is not an accident of the system, it is the point of the system.
  - coderzach 11y ago
    So you want to collect enough taxes to have the government provide zero interest mortgages. Does that mean everyone gets a mortgage, regardless of creditworthiness? You want me to pay for other people's mortgages, when they won't even give me one?
    - BBlarat 11y ago
      The parent never mentioned zero interest, why not have a interest just because the loan is granted by the government? Just call it a tax instead of interest.
    - rorykoehler 11y ago
      That's essentially how buy to let works. As a renter I am paying for someone else's mortgage. If I could get a zero interest (or even normal interest) mortgage guaranteed by the government I wouldn't have to rent and I could retain that value that I have generated for myself. As it stands I work my ass off and make someone else rich in exchange for keeping my chin just above the water line. Housing is a necessity and its profitization is unethical. It amplifies wealth disparities and destroys value in society.
      - jsprogrammer 11y ago
        How would banks collect profit then?
        rorykoehler 11y ago
        I didn't rule out being charged a nominal fee for the service. They could also focus on non-essentials? Banks have many products other than mortgages.
  - bmelton 11y ago
    Even if the banks weren't trying to make a profit, you'd still have to pay interest as loan-making is inherently risky enough that at some point, somebody has to cover the costs of those who default.
- denim_chicken 11y ago
  > You need a mortgage because you don't have $400,000 in cash sitting around. And a large part of why housing costs $400,000 in the first place is due to the availability of mortgages. Mortgages gave themselves a reason to exist.
  - ghiculescu 11y ago
    No, it's because a house is 400,000 times more valuable than a can of coke.
    - innguest 11y ago
      The banks really succeeded in convincing you that that's the price of a house, but that only says something about you, not about the real price of a house. A 500 sq ft monolithic dome house costs around $30k. It fulfills all the roles of a normal house, but better, safer, and cheaper. Now tell me how I'm wrong because "furniture doesn't fit in curved walls" and how that justifies the $370k discretionary increase in how much you want to help banks prey on homeowners and earn more interest.
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        > Now tell me how I'm wrong because "furniture doesn't fit in curved walls" Well, yeah, if you are going to have a house that small -- 500 sq. ft. -- optimal shape is a pretty big concern. > and how that justifies the $370k discretionary increase Well, much of the increase is going to be land price. Even a 500 sq. ft. dome home anywhere more typical home prices for reasonably moderately sized homes are around $400,000 is going to be a lot more than $30k just of the land it sits on.
        sdenton4 11y ago
        Eh, I lived in a 400sq foot dome for four years. Always with a room-mate, sometimes with two. It was great. The bit of space between the couch and the wall just becomes some oddly-shaped storage space. Sometimes people would carve their own dome-fitting bookshelves in the wood shop. There were fourteen of these domes, run as a cooperative, on three acres of land. The loans on building them were paid off in full by the early eighties, and I believe there was about a decade where no one paid rent. But eventually it was decided that a nest egg should be built up for upkeep and so on; by the time I was there, it was running about a third of market rent, and these days (due to some additional pressure to modernize) the rents are up to about 2/3 market. Cooperative ownership is fantastic, and a great cure for the ails of capitalism. But they tend to not get a lot of investment for exactly the same reason: capital isn't interested in investing in non-capitalist spaces. But it's certainly possible to band together with some friends to get an initial down-payment+loan. Then you incorporate the cooperative, and essentially 'sell' the house to the new cooperative, so that the 'rent' you pay to your new co-op pays off the bank loans. Once the loans are paid off, the cooperative becomes an autonomous creature, self-sustaining as long as there are people happy to live with other people and decide how the place will be run, rather than dealing with a landlord...
tjradcliffe 11y ago
> Why do I need a mortgage? If you want to see what life is like without access to modern financial tools, got visit an Indian Reserve in Canada. Housing is cheap there. Lack of access to modern financial instruments--municipal bonds in particular--is a major block in the way of First Nation's prosperity. Last year a new kind of "aboriginal bond" was floated for the first time to get around this, and hopefully more will come. So you have an example of what life looks like in your dream world. It isn't pretty. And like everyone else who is pro-finance here, I'm not saying there aren't issues with what we've got. We can fix them. What we can't fix is the massive poverty that comes without access to financial tools, however morally repugnant those tools seem to naive outsiders.
- random_6hm9v 11y ago
  > If you want to see what life is like without access to modern financial tools, got visit an Indian Reserve in Canada. Housing is cheap there. So the wealth which flows in resource-abundant places is due to banking, and subsequently the lack of wealth in some desolated lands is due to the lack of credit availability, and both have nothing to do with the natural conditions of those regions?

bluedevil2k 11y ago

You need a mortgage because you don't have $400,000 in cash sitting around. You need insurance because you don't have the personal finances to adequately cover the risk of "life"

alextgordon 11y ago
If we live in a democracy, and money is backed by the state, why do we have to pay interest to profit-making banks and insurance companies? Giving out mortgages is not difficult. You just have to be a bank. Not only that but 2007 showed that profit-making banks are even worse than a reasonable person, or precocious five year old, would be at deciding who should be given a mortgage. Mortgages are a necessary part of society. Profit-making banks are not. The only reason you spend your life slaving away paying extra interest to the shareholders of banks, is because banks have manoeuvred themselves into a privileged position. Inequality is not an accident of the system, it is the point of the system.
- coderzach 11y ago
  So you want to collect enough taxes to have the government provide zero interest mortgages. Does that mean everyone gets a mortgage, regardless of creditworthiness? You want me to pay for other people's mortgages, when they won't even give me one?
  - BBlarat 11y ago
    The parent never mentioned zero interest, why not have a interest just because the loan is granted by the government? Just call it a tax instead of interest.
  - rorykoehler 11y ago
    That's essentially how buy to let works. As a renter I am paying for someone else's mortgage. If I could get a zero interest (or even normal interest) mortgage guaranteed by the government I wouldn't have to rent and I could retain that value that I have generated for myself. As it stands I work my ass off and make someone else rich in exchange for keeping my chin just above the water line. Housing is a necessity and its profitization is unethical. It amplifies wealth disparities and destroys value in society.
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      How would banks collect profit then?
      - rorykoehler 11y ago
        I didn't rule out being charged a nominal fee for the service. They could also focus on non-essentials? Banks have many products other than mortgages.
- bmelton 11y ago
  Even if the banks weren't trying to make a profit, you'd still have to pay interest as loan-making is inherently risky enough that at some point, somebody has to cover the costs of those who default.
denim_chicken 11y ago
> You need a mortgage because you don't have $400,000 in cash sitting around. And a large part of why housing costs $400,000 in the first place is due to the availability of mortgages. Mortgages gave themselves a reason to exist.
- ghiculescu 11y ago
  No, it's because a house is 400,000 times more valuable than a can of coke.
  - innguest 11y ago
    The banks really succeeded in convincing you that that's the price of a house, but that only says something about you, not about the real price of a house. A 500 sq ft monolithic dome house costs around $30k. It fulfills all the roles of a normal house, but better, safer, and cheaper. Now tell me how I'm wrong because "furniture doesn't fit in curved walls" and how that justifies the $370k discretionary increase in how much you want to help banks prey on homeowners and earn more interest.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > Now tell me how I'm wrong because "furniture doesn't fit in curved walls" Well, yeah, if you are going to have a house that small -- 500 sq. ft. -- optimal shape is a pretty big concern. > and how that justifies the $370k discretionary increase Well, much of the increase is going to be land price. Even a 500 sq. ft. dome home anywhere more typical home prices for reasonably moderately sized homes are around $400,000 is going to be a lot more than $30k just of the land it sits on.
      - sdenton4 11y ago
        Eh, I lived in a 400sq foot dome for four years. Always with a room-mate, sometimes with two. It was great. The bit of space between the couch and the wall just becomes some oddly-shaped storage space. Sometimes people would carve their own dome-fitting bookshelves in the wood shop. There were fourteen of these domes, run as a cooperative, on three acres of land. The loans on building them were paid off in full by the early eighties, and I believe there was about a decade where no one paid rent. But eventually it was decided that a nest egg should be built up for upkeep and so on; by the time I was there, it was running about a third of market rent, and these days (due to some additional pressure to modernize) the rents are up to about 2/3 market. Cooperative ownership is fantastic, and a great cure for the ails of capitalism. But they tend to not get a lot of investment for exactly the same reason: capital isn't interested in investing in non-capitalist spaces. But it's certainly possible to band together with some friends to get an initial down-payment+loan. Then you incorporate the cooperative, and essentially 'sell' the house to the new cooperative, so that the 'rent' you pay to your new co-op pays off the bank loans. Once the loans are paid off, the cooperative becomes an autonomous creature, self-sustaining as long as there are people happy to live with other people and decide how the place will be run, rather than dealing with a landlord...

tjradcliffe 11y ago

> Why do I need a mortgage? If you want to see what life is like without access to modern financial tools, got visit an Indian Reserve in Canada. Housing is cheap there. Lack of access to modern financial instruments--municipal bonds in particular--is a major block in the way of First Nation's prosperity. Last year a new kind of "aboriginal bond" was floated for the first time to get around this, and hopefully more will come. So you have an example of what life looks like in your dream world. It isn't pretty. And like everyone else who is pro-finance here, I'm not saying there aren't issues with what we've got. We can fix them. What we can't fix is the massive poverty that comes without access to financial tools, however morally repugnant those tools seem to naive outsiders.

random_6hm9v 11y ago
> If you want to see what life is like without access to modern financial tools, got visit an Indian Reserve in Canada. Housing is cheap there. So the wealth which flows in resource-abundant places is due to banking, and subsequently the lack of wealth in some desolated lands is due to the lack of credit availability, and both have nothing to do with the natural conditions of those regions?