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You pay for the ability to access capital you do not currently have. Nobody owes you thousands of dollars with which to but a car. If you want to buy a car with money you don’t have, then you have to give the bank something in return. That something almost always is “more money than we initially lent you, over the course of the loan period” and if you shut that down, banks just won’t give loans anymore. Suddenly poor and middle class people have lost their biggest tool for accessing capital.

Lack of public transport is a separate problem. The US has dropped the ball across the board there. Only a handful of cities have any reasonable public transport and even those systems are old and often shitty.

Education being so expensive that it needs to be financed, is a separate problem. Education is too important to leave to the free market, letting our system metastacize to this extent is the result of decades of compounding failures.

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Cataphract@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
See, that whole entire thought process just doesn’t hold me prisoner anymore like it used to.

If you want the capital to survive (buying a car is survival in most places) or to try and get ahead, you must pay more capital than you have. If the banks don’t make money this way, the poor and middle class will fail.

I don’t think this is true economical theory anymore. It’s corrupted greed that’s overtaken institutionally in every facet of life including academia. It’s like saying nuclear war is the best peace keeping practice.

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- Bassman1805@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Cool how you used the quote markdown for a bunch of stuff I didn’t say.
  
  My argument is “The banks have a ton of capital. They are willing to grant lower classes access to that capital, as long as the bank is able to make some profit from it. If the bank cannot profit, they will just sit on that wealth and lower classes will lose the only access to such capital that they currently have.”
  
  Like I said, the fact that many borderline necessities in the US require access to capital beyond one’s individual means, is a real problem but separate from this argument.
  
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- VanillaFrosty@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  No no surely making the rich richer will help, it’s done so great the last 50 years!
  
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kipo@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Well I’m hoping to live in a world where banks don’t provide loans anymore. I’m demanding a better world than this nightmare that is unregulated capitalism in the US.

I’m demanding a better world than any economic system that incentivizes and rewards screwing each other over and hurting one another in a race to get ahead.

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- rbesfe@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Capital investment is necessary regardless of your chosen economic system. Without banks, you’re relying solely on a central government to dole out capital investment which has historically turned out poorly
  
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- Orangutanion@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Providing loans is a major part of a bank’s job though? Like yes it’s wrong that we need loans for necessities like transportation, education, healthcare etc, but even if all those were unnecessary banks would still need to provide loans so that people can start businesses or build houses.
  
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