Why do I want to hold people responsible for that? How does that bring joy to the world?
As I said: conservatives want to hew to principles. Liberals just want the world to be a little less shitty.
Cinderblocks? LUXURY! I dreamed of cinderblocks! My first bookshelf (when I was on my own) was built from scrap plank and a bunch of old Macs that I saw some officemates tossing in the dumpster. Not only did I use that through college, but well into my first years of teaching I kept that bookshelf, until ants built a revolting nest inside one of the computers and made it too stinky to exist.
I’m not some spendthrift. This isn’t about that.
But I gain no pleasure from exacting justice on those who are less thrifty than you or I. I find the idea of doing so, of looking down on them over my monocle and wagging my finger them, positively Dickensian.
In this case, there’s a business practice that is predicated on customers who don’t understand financial strategy well, and it uses their ignorance to finagle them out of their money. If I were all about the principle of the matter, either I’d be a libertarian or else I’d put those fuckers up against the wall. But I’m not about the principle; I just want a less shitty society. So instead I suggest we make this sort of business not possible.
Treating people like people is inherently less shitty than treating them like children. If all anyone cared about was “joy”, we could arrange a mass overdose of heroin and all go out with a bang.
Serious question - should we outlaw casinos, lotteries, and those stupid balance bracelets?
(Or the Monopoly game at McDonalds?)
Like I said earlier, I’m very much in favor of requiring these places to make it abundantly clear what the total cost of their products will be. If they are in any way misleading people, they should be stopped. But if people decide they really want a couch (or whatever) that badly, then they should (barring mental disability to the point where they are appointed some sort of guardian) be allowed to make that decision. I don’t want a couch so badly that I would pay that much. But I don’t expect other people to share all of my priorities.
I also have no problem forbidding certain kinds of transactions. For example, I think it’s a good thing that it’s illegal to sell your organs. I don’t think this sort of thing falls into that category, though.
Why does everyone assume the customers are stupid? Instead of rational but just with different priorities?
There is a grocery store near the taxi stand coming up to my neighborhood, poor area, poorest in the country. That grocery store is run down, has freezers that break down, and has higher prices than elsewhere with shitty selection. So why do people shop there? Because they don’t have cars and they only have to carry a hundred pounds of groceries 100 feet.
Are they stupid? Or being rational and deciding the trade off is worth the convenience?
In the newspaper, did the page facing the story about the woman have a story about a starving scientist? Maybe the publisher is trying to prove a point.
Good for you, but it takes time and planning and access to convenient transportation to shop that way. And yard/garage sales tend to be much better and more accessible in non-poor neighborhoods.
Sure, poor people often make bad decisions. But predatory lending places are basing their whole business model on encouraging and enabling their bad decisions. It’s not in any way “glorifying ignorance and stupidity” to point that out.
I teach math to 16-19 year olds in the most affluent municipality in Norway at the school with the highest required grade average to get in, and I still get students who don’t understand that simple concept. Some of them have even considered themselves “good at math”, because they’re intelligent and able to follow the steps of the limited “problem solving” algorithms required up through junior high. But they all have in common that at some point the math instruction they receive went beyond their ability to absorb it, and from then on math was something they did and learned by rote, further and further cementing a basic idea that math is incomprehensible, or the equally damaging idea that what they kept doing and learning was math.
I have zero problems believing that that’s a problem that’s worse if school is not among the top priorities in your shitty life, possibly poor even if you do pay attention, and follows the “one-size-fits-nobody” that math instruction appears to follow all over the world despite rock solid science describing the vast differences in abstract thought maturity in grade schoolers.
Yes, at some level of risk. Let me turn it back on you. Is there any level of risk where you think the opportunity should be denied people? If my business model is that I give you a loan to cover the down payment, secured by whatever you own, with payments deferred for six months (“Surely you’ll be back on your feet by then.”), collect the instalments on the goods until you can’t pay, repossess the goods, and then start going after you for the loan. Would you consider that a business practice that should be illegal?
If you don’t there’s really no common ground for us to debate on. If you do, at what point would you draw the line. It has to be somewhere between that exaggerated example and the real world examples from the article of terms that are so bad practically no one who could afford them would choose them.
If nothing else, I think the idea of requiring they explicitly state the total cost of the payment plan as well as the weekly payment and number of payments is a fair one. It does not prevent people who are a poor credit risk from making an informed decision to obtain credit despite the cost, but it does make it less likely for complete morons like Abbott to hang themselves.
I like this idea, I think homeopathic remedies are simply absurd and no reasonable person would buy them if they knew the truth but I don’t oppose their sale. As long as there is a big label on the package that states plainly this product is not a pharmaceutical/drug/nothing but water, if people still want to buy it great.
What is not cool is exploiting ignorance, if people enter into a purchase fully informed fine.
Another example is an OTC opiate pain killer called Paramol, the box has in large clear lettering “caution use of this product for more than three days can cause addiction” which is very reasonable. If someone chooses to ignore that they can’t claim they were uninformed.
EDIT:Before someone says anything my examples were simply of other things where full disclosure to consumers is valuable.
By definition, never, because you are not responsible for things you can’t control.
The difference actually is that liberals have compassion, while conservatives like you would rather sit in judgement. Liberals would rather fix the problem rather than just shrug their shoulders and say they deserve it. Liberals see that just letting these people crash and burn isn’t working, but conservatives would rather stick to their principles, and damn the people who don’t live up to them.
You would rather see people punished for doing the wrong thing, rather than even entertain the idea of trying to prevent the wrong thing from happening in the first place.
No one deserves to be saved, Bricker. Compassion is not something you earn. I would think you would be in the group of Dopers who would know this. But I guess your politics come first.
Why should people be stopped from intentionally making a poor decision? It has nothing to do with whether they deserve to be saved, more with what gives anyone the right to dictate someone else’s choices?
Making sure people are aware of the choice they are making or have full disclosure is one thing, but if someone decides that in their position the choice has merit why should anyone have the right to step in and act like a parent to an adult?
Why can’t I sell untested drugs and food not meeting safety standards for cheap, as long as I make full disclosure? Because society as a whole is better of without me being allowed to do so. It also seems likely society would be better off if there was some level of enticing poor people to spend beyond their means that was off limits.
I’m flexible on the food or drug issue, we don’t allow potentially tainted food to be sold since it is unfit for consumption. So I am cool with saying no even with full disclosure you can’t sell it as food. Chemicals are sold in different grades like industrial use or pharmaceutical grade already, so to me this seems like saying someone should be stopped from buying industrial grade chemicals because you suspect they are going to consume it. Or stopping someone from buying junk food because they are overweight.
If I open a shop selling dollar store toys for ten dollars, and people buy them for whatever personal reason wise or foolish, should society put a stop to that because they are being ripped off?
That wasn’t the position I was responding to. It wasn’t about freedom to make your own choices, but about “personal responsibility” being placed over compassion. It was very much about the liberal desire to save people, and how that was wrong.
For your argument, I would simply say that this same argument can be made about anything that is illegal. Any law forbidding an action prevents you from making the choice to do that action. That in and of itself is not an argument against making the action illegal.
You are focusing on the poor people and their freedom. I am focusing on the predatory lenders and their freedom. I don’t think they should be free to go after the very people they know can’t actually afford what they offer. The whole reason for the high interest is that they know they are very likely to default due to inability to pay.
This would be far from the first time we’ve done something like this. There are already several regulations on the financial practice of giving loans. Credit card companies have things they can’t do. Banks have things they can’t do. But these predatory lenders are giving basically carte blanche.
Ultimately, it’s really not about the poor people, and what they should be allowed to do. It’s about the lenders, and what they should be allowed to do.
Should a supermarket be able sell bad milk because to not do so would prevent your freedom to buy bad milk? Of course not. It’s not about what you are allowed to do. It is about what the store is allowed to do.
Sure and I don’t really have a desire to rehash libertarian talking points, I guess I just see a difference between predatory practices like:
“If you are one day late on one payment the interest rate doubles”
“You cannot pay off the loan early”
Which should be illegal and someone deciding eh fuck it I want a couch right now and don’t have the money, I can get it with 5 dollars down but it will cost me more in the long run. I don’t really know where to draw the line either, but I don’t like treating people like foolish children just because they are poor.
To me it isn’t about allowing predatory businesses to prey on desperate people, but just admitting sometimes a choice that looks stupid can make sense in certain situations.
I’m sorry but I’m not seeing any reason why payday loan places or rental centers should be able to skirt usury laws simply by renaming exploitive interest rates ‘special fees’.
That it’s the poorest and stupidest being exploited doesn’t excuse it for me. It makes it all the more shameful, I think.
Usury laws were put in place to protect the most vulnerable in our society. When we shut our eyes to this I think we ensure that the middle class will be the next to be served up, on a silver platter, to be exploited. The laws meant to offer US protection, also easily skirted simply by turning ‘user fees’ into healthy revenue streams.
Can you really act surprised when you read the stories that fill this board of outrageous behaviour by banks? I think they are two sides of the same coin.
A choice I find baffling, as the military shopping function [PX, BX, Exchange Unit, it can go by a few different names] do offer financing [in the Navy it is called the Star Card, it used to be an old school revolving charge account that used a simple signature, but somewhere in the early 90s it got changed to a non-name charge card.] Our base exchange sells everything from food [commissary] to furniture, clothing, shoes, uniforms, appliances, electronics … there is a dry cleaner/tailor and a thrift store that sells stuff donated to Navy Relief to make money for the MWR fund. Hell, H&R Block and some investment group do taxes and deal with helping the people on base deal with investments and retirement stuff.
And I do agree that there needs to be a mandatory Home Economics class that deals with everything from budgeting, personal finance, nutrition, shopping for food, shopping for home goods, dealing with insurance for home, vehicle, health and life [understanding why it is wise to get renters insurance, or to save 5% of your paycheck towards retirement] and stuff like that. You know, stuff my generation got taught that schools cancelled for lack of funds.
Major rant - why the fuck can’t people understand that taxes are a necessary evil. If we don’t pay taxes, where is the funding for all the social programs they are demanding coming from? I just nastygrammed 3 different local politicians running for office this fall about it. They are all working off the reduce/eliminate some damned tax or another platform … and none of them could tell me where the funding is going to come from when they eliminate the taxes. sigh
We are not talking about a business selling a faulty product, but an overpriced product. The supermarket-related analogy I would use is how you can buy multi-packs of snack-sized packets of things like fruit juice, crisps or chocolate bars. Here, the supermarkets clearly state the per kilo or per litre price of such items, which makes the premium price charged for the convenient packaging readily apparent to the customer, and so too should making the premium price of these potentially convenient rent-to-own stores be adequate here.