Seriously? I’ve heard something to the effect of “if you really cared about poor people, you’d want to get rid of food stamps and other enablers” from conservatives more times than I can count. I think such taunting is, unfortunately, common on both sides.
I have no scorn for the individual in the article, nor for the less fortunate, the unintelligent, nor anyone really. I think they should get to make their own choices. If those choices are good, and with a little bit of luck, they will thrive. If they make bad choices, they will fail, suffer, and possibly die. Same with me. Freedom to succeed means freedom to fail.
I only argue against the notion that these businesses are somehow unethical or should be banned. Protest against them, don’t frequent them, educate people to not use them, publish information, all of that is fine. But to say they should be illegal is too far.
Do you think they are not playing by the rules? Why do you think that?
I have no scorn for the individual in the article, nor for the less fortunate, the unintelligent, or anyone really.
More people get married when they get good jobs than people stuck in low wage positions with no prospects. So you are wrong.
Cite?
**Shodan **declined to supply a cite with his assertion, so I thought we were just pulling opinions out of our ass. But my ass has a higher rate of accuracy than his (or yours, for that matter), as evidenced by this Brookings Institute report that covered among other things,the correlation of income and the likelihood of marriage.
Lower marriage rates are a result of lower income and opportunity, not the other way around.
Let the hand-waving begin.
I can’t wave my hands until you produce a cite that demonstrates your claim. Got one?
Regards,
Shodan
I agree that that post could have been handled a lot better, but, in context, it’s not nearly as bad as it would seem at first glance. LHoD (whom I greatly respect) had connected “conservative” to “principles,” and “principles” to Stalin & Pol Pot. Bricker was merely responding in kind, even if it seemed like a non sequitur attack on liberals on it’s own.
I, for one, would be opposed to a ban of these types of rent-to-own arrangements on purely practical grounds. I’d support requirements for more transparent (and apparent) explanations about the costs – including going so far as to mandate the use of certain types of labels and contracts, whose designs would have the primary purpose of highlighting the difference in price between this and buying outright, and which come with prominent warnings (not unlike cigarettes) about how frequent it is for buyers to miss a payment and therefore lose both their money and their couch.
But if there were an outright ban, I’d expect it to have a neutral or negative overall effect, mostly due to unintended consequences. There would be a new loophole (or a new scam), and the poor would wind up dealing with the same basic issue, but in less efficient and more complicated marketplace. Or possibly not, but that’s what I would bet on, and I don’t think it’s proven that a ban would lead to more practical spending by the poor.
All that said, I think LHoD’s distinction between those who are focused on principles and those who are focused on results is, broadly speaking, accurate. It’s not the kind of thing I can prove to anyone else, but it’s nonetheless totally self-evident to me that most of the people opposed to banning rent-to-buy are primarily motivated in this by the word “deserve” and its associates. People who make stupid financial decisions deserve to have poor outcomes because of that. If these people are protected from their own stupidity and get better outcomes instead – and if my outcomes are therefore relatively less good – then that is wrong and should be opposed in principle. Any analysis of the practical results of such a policy comes afterwards, and takes place in light of that prior judgment.
I must admit I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this type of outlook. I think it’s an emotive response that typically bears only incidental relation to what’s actually good for people on the whole. It’s a wholly natural (or at least commonplace) emotive response, but it should be viewed as a discreditable one, to be resisted. In my experience, people making the “deserve” argument have shown very little interest in examining it’s origins, consequences, or alternatives when challenged … but I admit it’s ragingly unfair to paint half of the people in this thread with such a broad brush, so you can consider these last statements to be just my idle musings.
Shodan’s two assertions made sense to me. Yours did not.
It’s better than an uncited assertion, but it’s only weak evidence in favor of your claim.
IMO there’s an interplay of the various aspects and they can’t be completely separated.
Government intereference with individual freedom is objectionable on principled grounds and also has a long history of messing things up with unintended consequences, in addition to creating new sets of winners and losers even when they do work out as intended. But that said, some wrongs are so egregious as to override the above considerations. Whether someone is losing out due to their own fault or is a helpless victim is part of the equation which determines whether a particular wrong is so egregious as to override these considerations or not.
This +1.
Because LHoD’s notion that we will just make an exception to our principle of “adults are responsible for themselves even if they fuck it up” misses part of the point. One of the reasons I adopted it as a principle is because of my observation that there are going to be unintended consequences, and if it were the case that all we need to do about a problem is pass a law banning it, then the problem would have been solved long ago.
You can’t usually fix someone else’s problems for them. That doesn’t work. Even if “you” means “the government”, maybe even especially not if.
Regards,
Shodan
I think some people are missing the fact that this, as distasteful as it might seem, is actually an alternative to going into debt. Once you borrow money, you are stuck paying mounting interest as long as the principle is still unpaid. At some point you might find yourself with “debts that no honest man can pay”. With rent-to-own, the worst that happens if you can’t make a payment is… the rental contract ends and they take your iPad and Samsung speakers back. There is no remaining debt.
Now, I’m not saying this method of purchase is just fine and dandy, but it’s not exploiting some “loophole” in usury laws as renting is substantively different from buying on credit.
To the extent that this is true, it’s because liberals often know that charity can never really fix a social ill. Instead, the whole situation/system/etc. needs to be changed. FDR believed this (though was this only due to observing his extended family and their social circle, rather than data? I don’t know. That is a nice segue to my point below), but he only undertook his rather moderate actions due to substantial pressure from below, and the threat of radical action from the hard Left.
“Actual experience” consists of anecdotes, which don’t necessarily provide accurate date.
Yet sometimes it’s more expensive (for the rest of society) to allow them to fail.
I would be interested in checking the stats on that. I suspect that the difference is entirely due to donations to religious institutions. Being a member of a social club that demands 10% of your income, doesn’t directly correspond to compassion for those less fortunate.
ETA: here is a cite which supports this view
What you say is true, and indeed it’s a point that is made in the OP’s article. You don’t end up with any hit on your credit report, or any other post-default consequences except some money down the drain and no couch.
On the other hand, though, you also build no equity over time. If you borrow money to buy something—whether it be a house or a car or whatever—and you make payments over time but then fall behind, the item can be repossessed. But in most jurisdictions, one of the conditions in such cases is that the person making the payments is only responsible for paying what s/he owes on the loan. If you borrow $10,000 to buy a car, keep up your payments for four years, and then suddenly run out of money, you might still have far more equity in the car than the amount you owe the finance company.
In the rent-to-own scenario, however, you end up with nothing no matter when you stop payments. Because the payments are rent, if you stop just one month before the end of the contract, you still lose everything because the contract defines you only as a renter until the last payment is made.
It’s wsorth noting, by the way, that this is precisely how African Americans were screwed out of the benefits of postwar housing in cities like Chicago. Instead of being given mortgages, they were placed on what were essentially the equivalent of rent-to-own contracts, where they buuilt no equity, and where a single missed payment could result in complete dispossession and loss of everything already invested. There are some excellent books on this, and Ta-Nehisi Coates does a nice job of explaining it in his excellent Atlantic Monthly article.
African Americans were screwed in some housing situations after WWII but I fail to see why that has any relevance to the question at hand. The situation you described was an artificial lack of freedom endorsed by various U.S. governments while the topic in this thread about people to make free choices even if it isn’t eventually considered ideal by an outside auditor. I do have empathy for the former but none for the latter.
Artificial constraints on basic choices are completely different than self-imposed ones.
Listen up you dumb fucks, I have been desperately poor myself twice in my life and I wasn’t raised with any money whatsoever although I have more than enough now. I moved to the Boston area with $14 to my name and no assets other than a small pickup truck that got hit head-on on a Vermont road so that I had to lasso up a headlight on the front so that I could drive at night. I used that $14 to buy gas to get to the nearest city and I had a temp job the next day. It paid $8 an hour in downtown Boston and I had to wear a suit to work (thank goodness for thrift shops). I stuck with that job for 8 months and was thankful for the opportunity because I had no money and my entire diet consisted of fried rice and a single bright red spare rib split between two meals please whatever food was free at work. Commuter rail expenses ran $9 a day round-trip back then so I pretended to be asleep when the conductor came around to collect money. If you think that is an exaggeration or a joke, I have something for you and it involves one of my fingers.
The second time was 6 years ago. I had some incredibly serious health issues and got released from my job because of it (although I went last after the healthy people) and I was going through the end of a divorce at the same time. I instantly went into tens of thousands of dollars in debt to clear all of that up because it was live or die time. I put my resume on multiple job boards and a very famous one eventually called and gave me a job on the spot for more money than I was making before - no interview required. I have been there since then. I paid off my debts as quickly as possible and now I am building up considerable wealth because I live fairly frugally but not spartan.
My mother is a famous speaker and author about motivating people to do responsible things to help themselves. She taught the poorest of the poor in some of the worst schools in the country for many years. Many of them ended up in prison but there were also others that were absolute surprises when it came to the talent they had within them. One of the biggest success stories is a woman that I grew up with that was raised in the worst family you can imagine. They lived in extreme poverty and most of the males in the family are or were in prison for really bad crimes including murder but she decided to stay clear of that path and joined the Air Force straight of of high school. She used those benefits to get a college degree and become an Officer. Now she is a full Bird Colonel and expected to move up from there. There are countless cases of success stories from people that went through a whole lot and still managed to persevere. That is what needs to be encouraged, not someone telling you it isn’t your fault that you are a world class fuckup and there is nothing you can do about it because it usually isn’t true.
There are some points that conservatives/libertarians and liberals/progressives can agree on. One is that the current system isn’t functioning ideally. However, the general approach to fix those problems is extremely different. Good conservatives believe that most people can flourish on their own as long as they are given a strong framework to work within. Economic opportunity is the most important of those and you can take it or leave it. I can’t say what liberals want because it seems like a shotgun approach to scattered complaints rather than any coherent ideas. Some are legitimate and many are asinine. As a libertarian, I agree with liberals on most social issues that don’t involve government but the general idea derails quickly when it devolves into strict controls, especially economic ones.
That explains a lot actually. No seat belt, i assume?
No it doesn’t.
OK, but that’s enough for purposes of the discussion here.
Because even if it’s true that after these adjustments the percentages are equal, it still undercuts the argument that conservatives adopt their philosophy because they don’t care about poor people. Because if that were true you would expect to see them contribute significantly less.
I’m not seeing that as a good analogy. A better analogy is what people actually do instead of rent-to-own, which is buy on credit and make the minimum payment. That’s what you do when you are trying to minimize the weekly or monthly payments. You’re not building any equity by making the minimum payment on your credit card. These people are using rent-to-own because they can’t get a credit card.
Now, I don’t doubt that the stores are betting on the “own” part of the contract to never be enacted. But then they’re left with a used item that they have to get rid of at pennies on the dollar.
What makes you assume this? I’m betting they turn around and rent-to-own it to the next sucker in line at a slightly discounted (but still incredibly inflated) price. I don’t think there’s any law against renting out used furniture, is there?
If they can find someone to sign up to pay over 4 grand for a couch that’s barely worth a thousand, they can probably sign someone up at 2 grand for the same couch in used condition.