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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Weird stat aside, I was watching a podcast with Scott Galloway yesterday and he made a comment about Jerome Powell bringing inflation down to 2% without triggering a recession, and I had to facepalm. The rich, even those with a shred of empathy, are massively out of touch with what the 99% are experiencing right now.
Me, off in the corner believing debt is immoral
Society legitimately cannot function without debt. I agree giving people predatory "micro loans" for groceries is dystopian but every society that has discovered agriculture has also discovered the concept of debt because it's a natural consequence of an economic order so tied to seasonal cycles. Interest is also not bad, and every society that has developed debt has also quickly developed interest. Societies that have religious prohibitions or taboos against interest find workarounds because it's proven to be a critical part of how economics works. Personally I am glad that I was able to buy a house for hundreds of thousands of dollars I don't have yet because I will be able to pay off that in time and I appreciate that the bank is willing to lend me that money for such a long time at a relatively low rate of return for them. The Soviet Union even had banks that offered loans with interest but they were run by the State. It's kind of unavoidable.
Why was your house worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? Because we use debt. How do you think people lived for thousands of years? Home mortgages weren't a normal thing until like 100 years ago
Societies without it found workarounds, because it's easy. It's tempting. It's a money dupe glitch combined with gambling. If anyone uses it, they get an insurmountable advantage over all players who don't. It's moloch, it's the demon of racing to the bottom
You should not be able to spend your future
Many societies also develop a system of redistribution or debt forgiveness. It's known that too much debt accumulation in too few hands cause increasingly bigger issues or that circumstances change. But there are always those that need to learn the lesson again.
Not many societies developed a system of redistribution. We live in one of the extremely few that have, and it took a lot of smart people a lot of time (and infighting) to get into something that works.
We just need to apply it.
What kind of debt? Is it immoral to owe someone a favour? Or is it immoral for someone to owe you a favour?
Is it only immoral if there's interest? If someone lends someone $500 to cover rent, that's immoral? Is it more or less immoral to watch someone lose their housing when you could have helped?
Are you thinking about usury? Debt in general is actually one of the moat important threads of our societal fabric
Most important? I'll never go into debt, just won't spend money I don't have. It's a no brainer for me.
Do you own a home? Do you think that's a worthwhile thing to do? Without debt, home ownership is basically completely out of reach for most people despite the fact that many people will earn enough money to buy a house in their lifetime. It allows you to pay for money now with money later. Debt is legitimately an extremely important part of an economy- there's a reason it's been invented by pretty much every agricultural society in history. As with most financial instruments, it started with farmers - it costs money to plant and grow a crop of grain, but that crop doesn't produce money until you sell it at harvest time so you have an issue where if last year's crop didn't go so well due to weather and you are low on cash in the spring, you can't afford to plant next year's crop and get out of the hole. So borrowing money is the easiest way.
This also works with businesses and governments. Say you want to buy a machine that prints designs on T shirts because you want to sell T shirts. You can't afford the machine now, but you believe that you'd be able to with the money you could make from your T shirt business, so you go to the bank and convince them of the plan, and they give you money up front. Without debt, that T shirt business couldn't happen unless you got a bunch of investors to help you out.
Most important, because that's how most people start and grow their business, they don't have multimillion inheritance.
Also buying house.
Even if you're able to make that work on an individual level (never buy a home, don't get higher education, make sure you don't need a car), you can't make it work on a societal level.
If you want to contribute to supplying houses to people, you need to build the houses before you can sell/rent them (mostly). That means you need to take up a loan to pay for everything involved in building houses. Then you can sell/rent the houses to individuals that don't want to take up loans. Regardless of whether you personally ever take up a loan, you likely wouldn't have housing without someone doing it (unless you live on a family farm from waaay back), because the people that built it needed a loan to do so.
What? You can pay using your ass?