There is nothing wrong with investing in a productive enterprise and expecting to share in the profits of that enterprise.
If a man is starving (or, worse, has convinced himself he needs a new iThing when he does not) and you loan him money you are either violating charity or enabling debt-peonage, respectively.
This is setting aside the exponential nature of compound interest, which is why debt-based economies always go bust, and focusing on the individual morality of the transaction.
What they need is money, not loans, and, in particular, not loans against consumption rather than production, which is what broadly available credit inevitably devolves into. (Look at college loans, which started off ostensibly as an investment in productive assets and has devolved into financing four years of heavily curated consumption followed by crushing student debt.)
Even loans against production are dangerous and eventually lead to debt peonage and wealth concentration, as we have seen time and time again, from roman times onward.
The problem is usury, and there is a long, historical argument about it that is completely ignored in the west. This is because history is written by the victors, and the usurers won. We are all usurers (or aspiring usurers) now.
> What Patch offers instead is to take a piece of your home equity (currently limited to $250k maximum) and sell the upside on it to a investment fund.
Sometimes I can't help but feel that we deserve what's coming.
If trump is re-elected it may be the last time a republican wins a presidential election in the current system, due to demographic changes in key states (FL, TX, NC, etc.)
If the electoral college is abolished, it could actually end up getting another few republicans elected, since it would incentivize republican turnout in solidly democratic states like California.
There are many ways to do it, but one method would be to limit loans to some multiple (say 3x) of someones trailing income (say 3 years). This could be scaled into over time to smooth out price adjustments.
This is why housing affordability should be tied to income, rather than willingness to go into debt. As with education, once the banks can get a guarantee that they will be bailed out in case of trouble (explicit with education, implicit with housing) the race to the bottom commences. Prices go to the moon, everyone ends up in debt slavery
There is a reason the church was so hard on usury. I hope it rediscovers the issue: it is the most pressing social justice issue of our time, cutting across all non-elite identity classes.
There is nothing wrong with investing in a productive enterprise and expecting to share in the profits of that enterprise.
If a man is starving (or, worse, has convinced himself he needs a new iThing when he does not) and you loan him money you are either violating charity or enabling debt-peonage, respectively.
This is setting aside the exponential nature of compound interest, which is why debt-based economies always go bust, and focusing on the individual morality of the transaction.