But debt and interest are both sound concepts, and both are critical towards building an advanced society. Being able to borrow money from the future is enormously powerful.
...but it's not exploitation. Your head is thinking about bad debt, but bad debt is only a tiny fraction of total debt. It certainly makes for excellent highly memorable emotionally charged stories, which is why we are here, but the fact of that matter is that overwhelming majority of debt is paid off and bears actual fruit.
Even debt like student loans, which gets almost universally panned, is still good debt. The ROI on a collage education is ~1000% (amount borrowed/paid off vs. increased lifetime earnings). On paper your are still dumb to not take out student loans to get a degree.
No I was pointing out that simply because something is beneficial for some people doesn't mean we should want it to exist, which is what I read your comment as saying. Please don't tell me what I am thinking.
You're making the argument that cars shouldn't exist because some people die because of them.
Like I said, debt is overwhelmingly useful to the vast majority of people who use it.
We're not gonna ban cars because a handful of highly emotional road tragedies. We're not gonna abolish debt because of a handful of deranged debt collector stories.
If you want to make an argument make one. "Some people like it" isn't a strong one but if that's all you got I guess.
"We're not going to" presupposed the outcome. I don't agree and won't contend it, since you're not willing to say anything that can be refuted. I'm not the author of the future I can't say what we're gonna. But then neither are you.
"Some people like it" isn't a strong one because it's a straw man of my argument.
"The overwhelming majority bear tangible benefit from it" is the actual argument.
Debt is a core instrument of modern first world society. Just think about how many people would own a car, much less a home, if you had to pay for it all up front.
While having a car today is necessary when living any place where a century of planning has assumed everyone who matters has a car, this state of affairs is not indisputably better than what might have happened otherwise.
Home mortgages are only a few hundred years old, and it's not like they started out as prevalent as they are today.
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Just because we find ourselves in a particular place today doesn't mean other options aren't feasible. Assuming no better options could have ever existed sounds depressing.
