[fredkbloggs]

We could read 100 sob stories, or we could recognize that every single overdraft (other than errors and fraud, which do happen but are rare and these days invariably corrected) is voluntary. Yes, banks will make money any way that they can. Yes, they will happily take your last dollar, or even dollars you don't have and never will. No, they do not give one flying fucking rat's ass about you, your sister, or the homeless Vietnam War veteran who saves orphaned children on weekends and singlehandedly saved the world from nuclear annihilation last week. Twice. They don't care. Not one tiny bit. They're probably bastards.

So why in the name of all that's sane and holy would you give them money by falling into the traps that they set for you? You choose to write checks you don't know for sure are good. You choose to use your debit card instead of cash. You choose to keep poor records of your own accounts. These are choices that you make, or not, despite 13+ years of free public education that includes all the basic skills necessary to avoid this problem. And then you complain that the bankers are making too much money charging you a fee that you agreed to as a direct result of a transaction that you deliberately initiated against your account. You. Not the bankers.

If you can't or don't care to keep good records, you should use your checking account for only the bare minimum of transactions that you know for certain you can keep track of, only when you are absolutely sure you have enough in your account, and use cash for everything else. Basically, if it is at all possible to use cash for something, use cash. If you aren't sure of the terms on your account, get out your paperwork. If you lost it, call the bank and get them to send it to you again; they're required to do so. If you don't like the terms, find someone else; there are over 7,000 commercial banks in the United States.

There are thousands of pages of banking law and regulations devoted to making sure that you are aware of these fees, limiting them, obligating banks to refund or cancel them in certain situations, and on and on. It's your choice to pay them. It's your choice to hand those bastards a bunch of money for lending you literally a few bucks for a few days. Yours. Not theirs.

And they're not even grateful for it. You really oughtta cut those bastards off.

[methodover]

I think there's an aspect of morality that you're missing. There comes a moment when taking advantage of someone's lack of foresight, lack of intelligence, and/or carelessness becomes immoral.

I'm not sure where exactly that line lies, but I think I have a good staring place:

If you've created a system that takes someone's money -- even when that transaction was done with the person's prior permission in some way -- and that person says "Woah, wait a minute, this isn't what I thought I signed up for," that's a hint that you might be on the wrong side of that line.

If millions of people have that reaction, and legislators start making public inquiries into what you're up to, that's a REALLY good sign that you might be on the wrong side of the line.

[Karunamon]

And the best part is, you're being downvoted for this..

I dunno, apparently a lot of HN thinks that it's impossible to believe that banks are generally run by bastards while simultaneously believing that 99% of these instances are completely voluntary and completely avoidable?

If you keep track of what you're spending your money on, it's not a problem you're gonna have to ever deal with - and I say this as someone that's played this game with Wells Fargo in the past.

But apparently, advocating for people to be responsible for their own actions is a radical and terrible thing nowadays.

[danharaj]

It's probably because people usually grow out of the stage of political awareness where one imagines human beings to be atoms that aren't connected to one another. If you think that 'personal responsibility' or whatever allows you to judge someone as stupid, inferior, or deserving of misery, then you will have a bias that makes you see people as individuals cut off from all social and economic context because it gives you the most leverage to rationalize their misfortunes away.

People are all connected and all economic relations are social relations. If you treat everyone without their social context, you're basically saying that every powerful individual or institution can make relations with them a minefield because all that matters is that it's their weaker counterparty's responsibility to avoid all the mines. After all, everyone 'consents' to a 'voluntary' exchange. How could 'voluntary' exchanges be bad???

Your worldview is just a very immature way to rationalize predatory institutions and hostile power structures. Actions cannot be judged as voluntary except in context. The context that people like you and the grandparent tend to take is, at best, one of the law or some insipid moral principles based off of a rancid individualism.

[Karunamon]

You seem to know an awful lot about my worldview based on nothing more than a statement of the completely true fact that these wounds are almost entirely self-inflicted.

"Minefield"? "Don't spend money you don't have available to spend, otherwise bad things will happen" is a principle that most people are taught as children.

You seem to conflate the ideas of personal responsibility and the idea of deserving whatever gets thrown your way. We can talk about how crappy the idea of overdraft fees are all day long, but at the end of the day, it comes down to "doctor, it hurts when I do this", the response to which is "don't do that, then." The mechanism of the pain might be the result of a bad actor, but it's still your fault for inflicting it in the first place.

[danharaj]

Again, this sort of reasoning allows every institution to open the doors to maximize the chance that vulnerable people fail in order to capitalize on it. There are many, many, many more traps in the world than overdraft fees for vulnerable people to account for.

Governments, banks, employers, etc. are all hostile towards people.

Every detail you have to track in order to not get fucked is a liability The silence on your part on what responsibility our institutions have for the people they serve is deafening. What you don't say tells me as much about your worldview as what you did say. It's all boring as hell, trust me.

[Karunamon]

A detail such as "don't spend money you don't have"? Violating that principle will get you into trouble in ways that go far beyond checking accounts.

Are gun manufacturers to blame as some part of power structure when you point it at your foot and pull the trigger? If not, why?

[danharaj]

One would think a bank account were an instrument for storing and retrieving one's own money. Banks opted in customers to a system that would allow them to extract fees from people who work with low account balances. They exist.

Furthermore, if you look around this post's comments you'll notice that banks do far more than just charge for overdrafting. They specifically optimize for extracting such fees and behave in an adversarial way. It is often difficult to know what balance one actually has unless one does all their accounting by hand. This is a ridiculous cognitive burden that people with ample account balances do not have to work with. Every institution acts adversarially in this way, because institutions operate to maximize their power as much as they can.

It is not ridiculous to think that human institutions should be structured to serve people, not exploit them.

> Are gun manufacturers to blame as some part of power structure when you point it at your foot and pull the trigger? If not, why?

This is a stupid analogy. A better analogy would be, say, if you tried to withdraw money from your bank account, and if you overdraw, instead of rejecting the transaction, the ATM shoots you in the face.

It doesn't even fucking matter. The point is that some humans with a lot of power optimize the extraction of resources from lots of humans with very little power. You think that's ok and that a society structured around humans being hostile and exploitive towards each other is a good thing, and I think that's objectionable.

[fredkbloggs]

I don't feel that I'm a weaker counterparty. If I find myself feeling that way in a relationship, I am going to renegotiate its terms or end it.

The problem that you Progressivists have is that you cannot distinguish apparent power from real power. A bank may be evil, but its power over you is illusory. You are still free to terminate your relationship with it at any time. Real power comes only from the ability to use violence, which in the developed world is associated primarily with the government. That you cannot tell the difference between a tax assessed by the government and a fee charged by a commercial entity as part of a voluntary business relationship is the reason for your confusion and frustration. And mine as well.

[darkmighty]

Going on that line of thought, consumer protection laws, agencies and regulations would be nonexistent. Hopefully not everyone thinks that way.

Also, I never read about progressivism before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism

Can you sincerely say you are not progressivist after reading the introduction?

[fredkbloggs]

By the original philosophical definition, I'd probably qualify, though my affinity for the ideas is marginal. I'm not really convinced that our "advances" have improved the human condition. A few have, many others have not, and on the whole I think our species is in worse shape than it was 300 years ago. I'd like to think that an increase in our empirical knowledge would lead to an improved human condition, but empirically that doesn't seem to be happening. It might end up being one of those theories that lends itself to proof by elegance, but when tested just plain doesn't hold up. The string theory of its day, perhaps.

Unfortunately, Progressivism in 21st-century America bears little resemblance to Enlightenment thinking. It is a toxic brew of extremely hardcore Communism (Marx would have been appalled), beyond-stifling political correctness, defeatism, and a vicious temporal smugness that glorifies both ignorance and denigration of anything at all involving the past. Because of course we're so much better than they were. Not just more knowledgeable about the Universe, not just given the benefit of more experience, but better. Anyone who says otherwise is "speaking from privilege" and must be ignored, shouted down, or ideally punished or removed entirely from society (so that it can make more progress, naturally). Better men than I have commented on the astonishing narrowness of the range of ideas and narratives acceptable to these ideologues who demand inclusiveness. This philosophy wouldn't even be worthy of comment were it not occupying the entirety of the Overton Window.

To bring this to bear on the topic at hand, since Progressivists hold that everything that exists today is superior to whatever version of it existed in the past, it must be true that our gigantic bureaucratic regulatory regime is in every way superior to what it replaced (small government, laissez-faire market capitalism, individualism, etc.), we can make further progress by doing more of that. Since our system of laws has become so large and unwieldy that it's essentially impossible to comply with it, we may well make further progress by simply penalizing anything that smacks of success (undeserved, of course). Since our taxes are so much higher than in the past, we can naturally improve our lot in life by raising them further. Since we're better people than previous generations, we know better than they did and may safely ignore the lessons they learned in these matters (the Soviet Union, the 1950s-1970s tax regime, etc). When it comes to government, more is better, always and without exception. Anyone who has money, regardless of how obtained, is to be punished -- not for stealing it, but simply for having it. It's much easier than punishing crime, after all, and since people with money had a lot of power in the past, the future will be better if they have less. Ideally, less than none. Instead of punishing individual behavior, it's easier to just punish people who seem similar to people who were successful in the past (the decadent, evil, exploitative past again). It saves the trouble of finding evidence of wrongdoing, and after all, everything balances out in the end, right?

So we don't need to bother with the rule of law or written contracts; whichever party, historically speaking, was in a position of lesser advantage must prevail in any dispute. Anyone who's less than hopelessly impoverished and disenfranchised must have achieved that exalted position through fraud, theft, or murder; how else could one prosper in that past? And surely anyone who is poor today owes it not to any defect in himself but to the inescapable injustices of that past. Else what progress do we find in the march of history?

So if you're a banker, it doesn't really matter whether you've followed the law. It doesn't matter if you've disclosed your policies properly and timely. It doesn't really matter because you're a banker and the other guy isn't. You're wrong, and you'll always be wrong, and you'll keep being wrong no matter what you do until you give up and die.

Progressivism, in a nutshell, seeks to replace rule by law with rule by victimhood, just as the original version sought to replace rule by sword with rule by law.

Afraid I'm just not having any. But HN sure is.

[dang]

Please stop using HN to conduct ideological tirades. You've been crossing into personal attacks, taking discussions into flamewars, and behaving high-handedly. None of this is good conversation.

Everyone with an agenda thinks that they're enlightening the world with their rhetoric ("in the desperate hope that some young people will read this and understand") and imagines themselves surrounded by enemies ("this is one of the most heavily Progressivist boards on the entire Internet") while they of course are simply offering "facts". What's striking is how predictable this pattern is and how little it depends on the content. You could easily, and many do, have the opposite politics and behave the same way and make the same claims about other people. On HN this typically includes self-flattering interpretations of downvotes.

This is little different from preaching on a street corner, haranguing passers-by. When passers-by react badly, it's apparently irresistible to conclude that they're cretins. But really it's just that most of us don't like being preached at. I'm sure many of the people downvoting you agree with at least some of your views. But when you're trying to have an interesting conversation and ideologues show up with megaphones, it's a real bummer. And HN being a public forum, it's not like there's a quieter street corner we can all retreat to.

[darkmighty]

> I'm not really convinced that our "advances" have improved the human condition

I'm baffled. I can't comment on this, if you really don't believe things like going from a life expectancy of 30 to 80 years improved human condition.

So you just wrote several extended paragraphs of arbitrary philosophical justifications that I don't if someone would really fit in, lest any group homogeneously makes assumptions such as "it must be true that our gigantic bureaucratic regulatory regime is in every way superior to what it replaced".

What we're arguing here is about a specific consumer protection mechanism; you seem to oppose consumer protection in general, in principle. I don't see how that is justifiable, that simple.

By the way, I own a significant amount of shares of several large banks. So technically, I'm a banker, but I sure don't want me to "give up and die".

[danharaj]

I'm not a 'progressivist'.

[jkestner]

Don't forget to read all your EULAs!

Not everyone can afford to educate themselves on every consequence of every interaction with a corporation that is actively trying to obscure those consequences. I'm generally not ignorant, and I naively thought last week that if I transferred some money into a checking account on the same day that a payment was taking the balance below zero, I'd end up positive when the transactions were run at the end of the day. I got dinged $35.

[Karunamon]

See, this is an instance of the bank clearly being a dick, for lack of a better term. The money was there, you were being responsible, you still got dinged. This is wrong.

Now, how much do you want to bet that's not the case on some high-90s percentage of overdrafts?

The comparison to EULAs is specious at best. It's not like it's some legalese small print buried halfway through a lengthy document - they're disclosed separately and prominently, in part, because they're legally forced to.

[jkestner]

I think the EULA comparison is valid because in my case, the rules that explain that behavior (perhaps a transfer from another bank may take "1-3 days to be accessible") are also probably written somewhere, but the overall amount of noise, added to the noise of my daily worries, means that I'm likely to miss it.

I'm not going insert into the conversation a guess of what percentage of overdrafts are fair/unfair. I agree that many overdrafts are the exclusively fault of the account holder, but I tend to grant leeway when the bank has a general history of "being a dick."

[darkmighty]

Not talking specifics here, but there's a point that people must be shielded from their own ignorance (or even plain stupidity). There are lots of things to know about, and many people simply won't ever know about them by pure chance. I believe the law should actually be maximally protective of individuals up to the point it starts severely compromising the flexibility of businesses or individuals. Doing any less is masochism in my opinion.

For example, roads have guard rails in high traffic areas that mostly protect people from their stupidity -- you shouldn't speed near ledges otherwise; doing so would be stupid, and from then you could be small distraction away from death. It frees mental bandwidth and cuts transit times of travelers with little added cost. Nobody should have to suffer needlessly for poor decisions (not even taking into account most times it's just bad luck -- let's assume worst case it's just stupidity) if we can prevent it, and sometimes education won't work (not as fast as it should).

I've been stupid quite a few times with regards to physical/career risks myself and have a few otherwise very bright friends make stupid decisions. If those were preventable they should be prevented. They are much more efficient ways of teaching than allowing very significant mistakes to be made.

In particular, any safety mechanism for which if the majority of affected users post facto would agree upon can likely be put in place beneficially (which I would argue is the case for limiting overdraft fees).

You can think about it as if instead of needing people to learn about the innumerable (and mounting) hazards of the systems around us, we can free mental bandwidth and create other systems that learn about the hazards and protects us so we don't have to worry about it.

[outworlder]

Sure. For well-educated, silicon valley types with a resident accountant. You're missing out on the part that says that the poor (which many times goes with lack of basic education) are hit the most by these fees.

Not to mention that overdraft fees are a ridiculous concept to begin with.

[Karunamon]

I hope you're seriously not implying that it takes an accountant to know how you're spending your money.

Every checking account you can walk into a bank and get provides you with a paper register...

[fredkbloggs]

Well, I expected to be downvoted. This is one of the most heavily Progressivist boards on the entire Internet, so it goes without saying that this view is unpopular. And downvoting is much easier (and faster, and consequence-free) than arguing the facts, especially when they're not on your side. If I weren't willing to accept this, I wouldn't post here. There's a lesson in there somewhere.