I'm sorry to dismiss this more or less out of hand, but this is a case of anecdotal evidence. Using your case to generalise to greater choice is falling victim to the assumption that all players are rational actors.
How dare consenting adults do things I find offensive.
I don't drink. Drunk people act stupid. Let's ban alcohol. It'll be great. Prove to me it won't!
Oh, you enjoy alcohol responsibly? That's just anecdotal. Not like MY anecdotal evidence, I see drunks everywhere... everyone knows that. And they are all alcoholics who are depraved by predatory beer companies.
My anecdotal evidence is good and corroborated by my tribe. And you must prove me wrong, despite the fact that I'm the one making statements like we need to regulate something.
Oh, and of course, once we ban it, no mafia guy is going to start offering it in a sketchy way... there's NO WAY that will happen in a low class neighborhood because we really take care of our poor. I have this all planned out. Going with my gut to make emotive detached decisions instead of dealing with the grit of reality is so nice. /s
I mean despite your terrible sarcasm, we do have rational regulations on things like alcohol or gambling because we recognize that it helps protect people overall, sometimes indeed from themselves.
Your argument is essentially 'I don't drive drunk, therefore we don't need any laws against drunk driving' since the expectation is that people will behave rationally. Or that we don't need regulations against things like cigarettes because people know the harm already.
Obviously there's room to debate on how socially dangerous something is and whether it warrents regulation; hence the ongoing debate on marijuana legalization; but in general he's right: relying on anecdotal evidence and extrapolating that is bad form. It provides context and reason for your arguments, but is not an argument in itself.
Err, we do have payday lending regulations. The new ones would basically destroy the industry. It would remove the vast majority of lenders of last resort. It wasn't just capping fees. It was 'making sure the lender could pay'
Let's see, who else does that... banks.
How? a credit score. Which has nothing to do with being able to pay truly pay long term or be sustainable. Some poor people have good credit. Some rich people have bad. It's... messy.
But please don't let the details of what you support actually alter what you support in name.
BTW, if the rules were only targeting continuation fees (i.e. multiple debit restriction part), I'd 100% support them. Remember, your talking to someone who has been there, done that.
I'm not against all legislation. I'm against privileged people sitting on a high horse, looking down on 'the commoners' and telling them what they need.
I personally would not have qualified under the new regulations when I took the loans.
I feel like I'm talking to someone who has good health wanting to ban sneezing instead of helping the sick. And you are talking to someone who has been sick.
I've spoken extensively here on HN about my experience growing up dirt poor; such as having to go through schooling with teeth quite literally rotting and broken down to the gumlines without being able to afford fixing them. So you arent exactly making a strong case for me here.
But to make an actual argument here instead of solely an appeal to my history: I know exactly how companies will behave when untethered from regulations. A great example is that banks would deliberately delay checks my parents would receive so that they could collect overdraft fees.
I don't have much sympathy for payday lenders given one of the regulations in the article was to prevent payday lenders constantly trying to withdraw money from accounts in order to collect on fees. And the regulations would've prevented payday lenders from deliberately giving poor people incredibly large loans that they could never pay back and be effectively stuck in debt with due to high fees. Acting like these regulations would've somehow stopped lenders is wrong at best and fearmongering at worst.
What are these rational regulations? Does the ban on buying cold beer from a gas station in Indiana have a strong backing showing that the cold beer barrier is reducing alcoholism? I’ll save to some time, there is no link. It’s protectionist crap hidden behind the guise of moralizing.
States have wildly different liquor laws they all claim are “rational”, which may be true but they certainly aren’t rational to protect people. They are just designed to exploit moralizers to protect (liquor stores, grocery stores, bars, legal firms, etc).
These laws are so stupid that there are only a few cities in the entire United States where you can consume a beer in public despite there being separate laws banning public intoxication! WTF!?
People are far from “rational” when getting on the moralizing icky feelings bandwagon.
Likewise, I find any and all laws criminalizing common scams to be gross and onerous. I would rather live in a free society, where I'm sure everyone would educate themselves and never fall for these scams, and if they did fall for one, then clearly the scam was good for them and they got something they wanted in exchange. Who are we to try to prevent that?
I think you need to look up the word scam. Then use words based on the dictionary definition of them the way the rest of us do. It helps in communicating when people use a dictionary to define words instead of the thoughts in their head.
Not at all. Just because you have agency, it doesn't mean you'll wield it rationally, or even responsibly.
And so you get the central question: in what cases should you protect people from themselves? It's a hard question to answer. Given that financial education in the US is nearly nonexistent, I would personally err on the side of protections in the financial sphere. Does that mean that some legitimate cases get denied? Probably. Is that a worse outcome? I don't know the answer to that.
So by protection, you mean the bill as it was, that would 'remove pay day lending'. Maybe we'll copy what we did with drugs.
Hmm... what guarantees mob option will stop existing? That's what's happened with drugs. Drugs are easily available.
Or are you suggesting creating another lender of last resort?
I'm sorry, I'm not sure your offering a solution. It seems what is offered is a blind restriction to satiate your own feelings of 'protecting others'. Like we've done with drugs. It doesn't work because it doesn't address the problem, just the symptom. It's arrogant and short sighted.
I wasn't coming down for or against the bill as-is at all; merely on the assertion about agency the parent commenter made.
I suggest you calm your anger and finger pointing and avoid reading things that I did not write.
I too agree that the War on Drugs is a boondoggle and has caused more harm and created more criminals (legitimate and otherwise) than we'd have without it. But I think we can agree that having a lot of people (for example) suffering and dying from opioid abuse isn't great either. Rehabilitation programs are the obvious answer, not just jailing people.
Payday lending is a totally different beast. I'm not sure what a great solution might be. While it's physically safer to take a loan from a payday lender than from an illegal, shady, mob-run loan shark, payday lending can still be incredibly harmful. Outright banning probably isn't the answer, but allowing them to run as they have been isn't great either.
I don't drink. Drunk people act stupid. Let's ban alcohol. It'll be great. Prove to me it won't!
Oh, you enjoy alcohol responsibly? That's just anecdotal. Not like MY anecdotal evidence, I see drunks everywhere... everyone knows that. And they are all alcoholics who are depraved by predatory beer companies.
My anecdotal evidence is good and corroborated by my tribe. And you must prove me wrong, despite the fact that I'm the one making statements like we need to regulate something.
Oh, and of course, once we ban it, no mafia guy is going to start offering it in a sketchy way... there's NO WAY that will happen in a low class neighborhood because we really take care of our poor. I have this all planned out. Going with my gut to make emotive detached decisions instead of dealing with the grit of reality is so nice. /s