[tptacek]

None of this is responsive to anything I've written, or, really, anything Patrick's written. You want to explore your curiosity about possible alternate banking systems, that's fine, but you've been writing here and elsewhere that Patrick was disingenuous to talk about the banking system we actually have, and no, you're wrong about that.

[lmm]

You cannot honestly explore the causes of a banking phenomenon (one that's distinct to a particular few banking systems, even!) while treating the "banking system" as fixed and immutable (or even wholly distinct from the banks), and to do so is to attempt to pull the wool over the reader's eyes. The choice of which contributing factors to write about and which to ignore is not a neutral one and not an accident. (And similar things apply to the choice to describe outrages in mechanistic, normalising terms)

[tptacek]

You are off on your own thing here. You are free to be off on your own thing. But your thing is unrelated to the article, and you should stop trying to frame your thing as if it was a trenchant comment on the article; it is not.