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The more you chip away at the human rights of poor people, the more you succeed in making sure "cases like my own" cannot possibly exist.

And that's exactly my point. Your assumption that I'm some weird statistical outlier is exactly the problem.

It comes across to me roughly like this:

"Oh, Doreen is actually smart or something. But that's the rare exception among the poor. So fuck the rest of 'em!"



The fact of the matter is that things like payday loans exist to exploit the poor and homeless in a way that ensures that they live perpetually in debt.

To take your argument to its rational extreme, it would be a bad idea to disallow poor people literally selling themselves to a corporation because that's taking away their basic rights.

And this is literally something that happens when you don't put regulations to stop it [1]. The fact that the poor predominately are people who take payday loans which often end up exploitative of their situation should tell you that payday loans might be a bad thing! The norm is that people are not escaping payday loans. Payday loans need to go and we need an actual safety net in place.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/09/us-payday-lo...


to disallow poor people literally selling themselves to a corporation

This isn't a right we grant other people, so, no, it is not the logical conclusion.

The antidote to a Payday loan habit is more earned income or other access to resources that aren't borrowed. So if you want to solve this, give cash gifts to poor people you know, help vulnerable people access earned income or other resources, work on solving the housing supply issue in the US and/or work on addressing the healthcare issue in the US.

I do what I can to provide useful information to homeless and at-risk Americans as my contribution, for example:

https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/

https://genevievefiles.blogspot.com/

http://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/

https://www.pocketputer.com/

https://writepay.blogspot.com/

Simply cutting people off from the shitty resources they currently have access to without giving them something better only makes their problems worse. It's easier to cut people off than provide additional (superior) support and most people arguing vociferously for cutting them off are not actually actively working on better solutions, so it ends up being a big fat "fuck you" to the poor with a self-righteous justification to make it sound better.


> This isn't a right we grant other people, so, no, it is not the logical conclusion.

It isn't something people are allowed to do now because we've decided that it was too societally abused in the past. Look up the history of voluntary indentured servitude, for example.


We developed other instruments. Indentured servitude was a way to pay a debt when money per se and financial instruments were relatively primitive. It was kind of the debt version of barter.

Develop better instruments and solutions, and then Payday loans can join indentured servitude and dinosaurs in museums.




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