It traces back to this new-fangled innovation called allowing people to enter into contracts, and allowing parties to take actions in compliance with those agreed-to contractual terms.  Breaking news, I know. 

Further, you always receive a notice when your credit line terms are going to be altered, and have the option to terminate the agreement and pay it off under the old terms.

Yes, contracts are wonderful things when one side has a legion of lawyers, lobbyists, and fine-print printing machines and the other side has a person who more than likely is fresh out of high school.

Amazingly, just because a system allows standardized contractual terms to be entered into, doesn’t mean that it’s a conscionable form of contracting, particularly when one party holds all the power and information in terms of determining the scope and nature of the contractual terms, and can often change them with no affirmative action or even verified notification to the other party. 

SHOCKING. 

Idiot.

Essie—Your remedy is not to enter into agreements with credit card companies.  There is no right to credit.  If you don’t like the terms offered, walk away. 

Jesse—Same response.  There is no right to a credit card.  If people don’t like the way credit card companies deal with them, their remedy is to not not use credit cards.  Note again that when your terms change, you receive a notice and can cancel the agreement and pay it off under the old terms.  When this happened to me, I received a notice saying as such (and, in fact, canceled it and just paid off the balance).

Actually, there’s another option called the legal system which can work to make contracts more equitable.  You might want to check such resources as the Second Restatement of Contracts, the Uniform Commercial Code and the past several hundred years of contract litigation and legislation.

I wish that people could just “walk away” from the standardized and often abusive terms that plague the credit card industry, but given the prevalence and need for credit to do almost anything major in life, it’s like wishing that my dog would shit gold. 

If your solution to everything is “don’t like it, don’t do it”, I certainly hope that works for you.  The rest of us in the real world will be working to make sure you don’t get fucked over at every opportunity.  You can thank us by making us brownies.

And Allen?  When you cancel cards, it hurts your credit rating.

Jesse—Yeah, it hurts your rating because it reduces your length of credit history and increases your utilized credit.  I’m aware of that.

Your central conceit is wrong, though: Credit cards are not a necessity.  See, e.g., the works of Dave Ramsey.  They’re a convenience.  Your position seems to be that banks are obligated to provide a convenience on terms that you personally find palatable, and your preferences should override the willingness of others to enter into agreements under the current terms. 

The UCC and second restatement also have roughly nothing to do with credit cards, so I’m not sure what you’re on about in that regard.

Franklin—Or maybe we should let people make their own decisions whether it’s about reproductive or economic freedom.

It traces back to this new-fangled innovation called allowing people to enter into contracts,

Except that credit scores are a proprietary system whose metrics are kept purposely obscure and whose score cannot even be discovered by the target of a credit score without paying money for the privilege. And yet the numerical score itself is what determines your ability to get a loan and the interest rate on that loan. Only a toady would see this as anything other than an exploitative relationship by a semi-malicious institution. That’s why we support regulations.

Tyro—Actually, I see it as parties lending money deciding on what basis they’ll lend that money.  Since nobody has the right to demand that somebody else lend them money, they have that right.  If I knock on your door and ask to borrow $100, I’m not going to start dictating terms to you.

[All of this is of course complicated by TARP, which is why there shouldn’t have been a TARP in the first place..]

No treating people like independent adults.

Yes, actually. We should treat companies like independent adults who have no more money, resources, or power than individual credit card holders. Or we can treat individual credit card holders with people who have as much power and negotiating leverage as credit card and credit-rating companies, via their proxies the federal government. Either scenario is fine with me!

Aw, our new trolls think they’re people.

So cute.

Those credit card “contracts” are a lot like those software use agreements you have to click through before you can get at what you paid for.  Those are so ridiculous there’s no way they would hold up in court. 

Putting your signature at the end of a page of microscopic legalese that even lawyers would argue over is not much in the way of consent, especially when one of the parties has no realistic way to know what the terms actually mean.  Add in the secrecy surrounding credits scores and other evaluations of risk, and it’s hard to see how they are fair.

But when most of Congress is in the pocket of the financial industry (apparently the only “industry” left in America) what else can you expect…

Next stop:  Bringing back Debtor’s Prison…

Tyro—Actually, I see it as parties lending money deciding on what basis they’ll lend that money.

I really don’t care what personal delusions you hold, nor do I feel the need to feed into those delusions. Your inability to understand what’s going on or have any idea what you’re talking about in order to further your fanatical libertarian cultist isn’t my problem. You can either deal with the reality of the situation, or you can resort to mouthing childish libertarian platitudes. The latter gets you laughed at as a foolish ignoramus.

Shorter Tyro: The Soviet tactic of accusing political opponents of being delusional was an excellent idea.  I use it whenever I have no counterargument.

Mike: ... you can also not use the software in question.  Or should I presume you have the right to other people’s IP on whatever terms you like as well?  Because the credit card companies drafted the contract, by the way, any ambiguity is held against them under the doctrine of Contra Proferentem.

All persons must be treated like children and taken care of by Barack Obama
and Jesse Taylor. 

No, all credit card companies and lending institutions are to be treated as entities who must live in service and submission to the law in exchange for the government’s cooperation in collecting their debts. It’s what we call a symbiotic relationship in which the interests of both parties are balanced.

It’s pretty rich when people caught up in the libertarian cult pontificate about the sanctity of contracts from government interference and then go running like screaming little children to the government when they want their precious contracts enforced. Since lenders basically wholly dependence on the government for contract enforcement, it makes sense that we, the public, are going to start thinking about what we are and are not willing to accept.

The real solution is that these unilaterally flexible contracts need to be made illegal. Short and simple. Commercial contracts should clearly state all important terms, and these terms should be very clear and binding. No “Rates may change in the future” or any of that bullshit.

If the credit card company wants to break the contract, they can send a letter requesting that the terms be renegotiated. However, if you turn down the new terms, that should NOT count against you on your credit.

Tyro—You rely on the government for a variety of things.  So, I presume a law that requires you to lend me your money at 1% will be fine by you.  Let me know where I should go to pick up the check.

The two fundamental inequities you’re proposing are 1) Demanding that the government declare how others should lend out their capital and 2) Demanding that contracts you’re not a party to conform to your preferences. 

And enforcing contracts to their terms, as agreed upon by adult parties, is a legitimate function of government.  Your logic, if it was accepted, would give the government the right to unilaterally alter the terms of any contract under any circumstances.  If you want a dictatorship, you’re in the wrong country.

The Soviet tactic of accusing political opponents of being delusional was an excellent idea.

No, it’s pretty much libertarian = stupiditarian. They’re incapable of dealing with reality and recast the argument in terms they can understand to be shoehorned into their libertarian cultish delusions. I explained to you what the situation was, and you said “I don’t believe it!” So there was nothing to discuss. you chose libertarian lies over reality, and then get upset when I refuse to engage with such willful lies. Your libertarian perceptions are untrue, and thus irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

You simply have a libertarian belief and force every situation to fit it. So there’s nothing to discuss with the libertarian. It’s a religion, not a policy stance.

Tyro—If by ‘explained what the situation is’ means ‘asserted that the government has complete dominion over all contracts,’ then yes.  If that’s not true, then everything you said is a non sequitir. Since it’s not true, you have nothing but insults to offer.

”... you can also not use the software in question.”

While I could probably, given enough time, write an operating system, language compilers and interpreters, a word processor, spreadsheet, web browser, etc., (hey, that’s what the CS degree is for, right?) I’ll probably only live long enough to create one of each by myself.  Probably won’t have the time to use them.

I guess I could always build myself a one-room cabin in Montana and mail wooden bombs to people I consider responsible for our high-tech world…

Mike—Ever heard of ubuntu and associated software? If you truly object to software licenses, you have a variety of freely-licensed options.

1) Demanding that the government declare how others should lend out their capital

Yes. Like telling banks that they need to retain a certain percentage of capital relative to the amount they’ve lent out.

2) Demanding that contracts you’re not a party to conform to your preferences.

I am a party to those contracts, since the government that enforces those contracts represents me.

Your logic, if it was accepted, would give the government the right to unilaterally alter the terms of any contract under any circumstances.

Sign an employment contract where you agree to pay someone less than the minimum wage. The government will step in and tell you that you can’t make that contract. If they caught you with the contract in effect, they’d have the authority to alter the terms and force you to pay the person for the missing money you refused to pay him.

If you want a dictatorship, you’re in the wrong country.

It’s a democracy. As a consequence, the laws that the government has are only the laws that the public feels comfortable enforcing.  It’s a dictatorship in which public outcry at lack of regulations and use of the government as a proxy for powerful economic interests against the people would be ignored, as you seem to advocate.

I am a party to those contracts, since the government that enforces those contracts represents me.

I’ll come back and respond to the rest in a second, but I want to highlight this bit: Every contract that’s enforceable is enforced by the government.  Therefore, you consider yourself a party to every contract that’s entered into and feel the government has the right to dictate terms in every contractual situation.  If the government declared the minimum price of a bagel to be $10, that’s fine by you, because the government will be called to enforce the contract if somebody doesn’t pay.  That is a frightening amount of hubris and an amazing view of state power… and exactly the logic used to justify anti-choiceism.

Your remedy is not to enter into agreements with credit card companies.

Thereby never getting a “credit rating” and thereby never being able to own a home, a car, or anything else that I don’t have the cash upfront for.

Well, I guess I could rent indefinitely until I have enough money saved up to buy the house outright… oh wait, nearly every rental property on earth requires a credit card number in case of incidental damages that you might skip out on.

Hmm.

Well, I could choose to live in a carton on the street.

I like, by the way, how you blew by the fact that a contract entered into by two incredibly unequal parties (huge company + lawyers + abusive collectors + slick marketers + lobbyists vs. college students with little life experience and no financial knowledge at all thanks to NCLB and those precious test scores) is, what is the word? Oh, yes, unfair and not conducive to a stable society.

Unless you consider the high rate of teen suicides over credit card debt to be a mark of stable society.

You know, just when I think I understand how stupid libertarians are, I run into these sort of discussions and realize that they’re even dumber than that!

Anti-usury laws are nothing new. The government being unwilling to enforce certain contracts or declare certain contracts void is nothing new. But libertarians take this as some sort of huge offense to humanity. It’s like eating lunch and then having the person sitting next to you declare that eating pasta with a fork is some kind of disgusting, unsanitary behavior.

Your central conceit is wrong, though: Credit cards are not a necessity.  See, e.g., the works of Dave Ramsey.  They’re a convenience.

Try to rent or buy a car, get a job, rent an apartment or buy a house without a credit rating and see how far that gets you.  I look forward to visiting you in your cardboard box. 

Also, the Restatement does govern credit card contracts, as they’re (follow me, now) contracts.

Therefore, you consider yourself a party to every contract that’s entered into and feel the government has the right to dictate terms in every contractual situation.

Given that the government has a whole body of laws governing contracts, the government does effectively dictate some terms in every contractual situation.

The government being unwilling to enforce certain contracts or declare certain contracts void is nothing new. But libertarians take this as some sort of huge offense to humanity.

Sure, because it contradicts a truism.  And if a truism weren’t true, it wouldn’t contain the word, now would it?

Allen, you’re not addressing the point first raised in the post: it is more than simply a question of a credit agreement between two parties, but also the issue of credit-worthiness as adjudged by the credit rating, a process in which one party (the lender) has large input and into which you (as borrower) have none.

Compare the process to dating.  I have every right to ask you out, and you have every right to say yes, or no, or yes now and no later.  I don’t have the right to secretly tell everybody in your dating pool that you have syphilis.

“If you truly object to software licenses, you have a variety of freely-licensed options.”

...should I remind you (while typing on my Ubuntu Linux box) that even things like Ubuntu have license agreements you must agree to?...

So Allen, I have a credit card I’ve held since 1988, one of only two that I hold. That credit card helps my standing for a credit rating because I’ve had it so long and have been meticulous in keeping up payments. The credit card company—without asking me—upped my credit a few years ago, and kept increasing it. I keep my credit card balances low. So a couple of months ago, the credit card company decided to cut my available credit by 40 percent—because I kept my balance low or paid it off monthly.

That means, by the formula the credit rating companies use, my credit score goes down. And if I cut up my card and send it back to them, my credit rating goes down even more. So basically this consumer gets screwed either way even though she was keeping up her side of the bargain. Yeah, great world you want us to live in, where these mega corporations hold all the cards.

Try to rent or buy a car, get a job, rent an apartment or buy a house without a credit rating and see how far that gets you.  I look forward to visiting you in your cardboard box.

You’re missing the point Jesse.  If a person can’t pay for a car etc, then they shouldn’t get them.  If they need to borrow money then they have to submit to their new owner’s terms.  Regulations would just mean that those worthy to own cars etc would be held back by the parasites of society.

besides, are you a middle school student or something, to think you can get by in this society without a credit card? Or are you so rich, you inherited your property and can pay for your car outright with cash?

louC raises an excellent point on the credit rating / credit granting incest game. 

There’s nothing wrong (and more things right) with freedom to contract.  There’s nothing wrong with terms of a contract which permit change at a later date on notice (billing rates, interest rates, and so forth).  There is something arguably wrong with an ability to change a fundamental term of the agreement (eg: how much credit is granted) but it’s not definitively wrong.  What is searingly wrong is the ability to have an arbitrary change which impacts on other contracts.

We still have yet to see an argument which addresses the credit/credit rating relationship.

..... runs out spraying Troll Away(TM) .........

Beyond the major need to have a credit rating in order to function in our society in all the ways mentioned by others, my experience tells me that having a credit card can make the difference between an emergency being “OMG LIFE SHATTERING” and “eh, that is too bad but I’ll get through it.” 

When your car breaks down and you need 800 bucks worth of repairs just to get it moving again, having access to credit can be the difference between losing your job because you can’t get there anymore or just having 800 dollars more debt to worry about but remaining employed and therefore having a good chance of repaying it and coming out of the situation relatively unscathed.

A sadder example I can think of is a woman I talked to a couple days ago who is going to need to travel a considerable distance and pay over 1000 dollars for a second trimester abortion because when she found out about the pregnancy she couldn’t come up with the 400 dollars for an early abortion in time.  It took her this long to find a funding source and make arrangements for the more complicated, expensive, painful and (for a lot of people) more morally difficult procedure.  If that were me I would have put the 400 bucks on my emergency credit card.

Because SHUT UP, that’s why!

I have a lousy credit rating, largely because I’m what one might call compulsively irresponsible. I can’t get a DEBIT CARD. I only have a savings account because an aunt works for one of the banks and arranged to get me a special type of account without the usual ‘overdraft protection’ they want to offer.

When I fly, I need to have my father charge the plane tickets or I get forwarded to the anal probe lane in security. I can’t rent cars or hotels. I have an apartment only because my landlord is a friend of a friend. I pay rent to the first friend because he wants the rent as checks and I’m cash-only.

Doing business on the internet is such a pain in the ass that I don’t do it. This isn’t likely to change for my entire life. It’s fortunate I’ve more or less resigned myself to never having a relationship, because if I ever combined my finances with someone I’d be an incredible boat anchor to their finances.

I wouldn’t wish this on anyone else.

Have the trolls given any reason the Credit Formula needs be secret? That seems to me completely a dick move with no reasoning behind it.

This isn’t likely to change for my entire life.

I believe bad marks on your credit rating only last for 7 years, correct?

Tyro:Only if you never pay it. It’s 7 years from last activity on the debt.

Which is beyond fucked up if you ask me. There’s so much wrong with that I don’t know where to start.

The corporations would never engage in deceitful practices, would they?  Like maybe raising you from 9% to 29% for being $3.00 over limit and you were over limit because you can’t predict this month’s credit charge which is what put you over the limit (not a purchase) and even though you were on automatic payment not charging you for the overage.  And then, adding an overage fee three days later.  They wouldn’t do that, would they?

“They wouldn’t do that, would they?”

...well, they would, but they don’t really want to.  They’d prefer if you just have your paycheck sent to them directly.  Much simpler…

Ownership of a credit card* is a practical necessity to participate in middle-class economic life.  Car rentals, internet purchases, and establishment of a credit history to allow one to take out a mortgage.  All of these things are meaningful parts of the basic American standard of living.

In this context, regulation of an industry which is the gatekeeper for household credit would seem to be a no-brainer.  These are the folks who decide who can and cannot get a home; it would seem to be vital that they do so based on real information and not leverage that power into unfair contracts.

*to a lesser extent, debit cards can make up for this, but they cannot do many of the important things.

If by ‘explained what the situation is’ means ‘asserted that the government has complete dominion over all contracts,’ then yes.  If that’s not true, then everything you said is a non sequitir. Since it’s not true, you have nothing but insults to offer.

I’d like to get back to the fact that Allen honestly believes the government is not involved with contract law. 

Seriously.  He has no idea how the courts work.  He has no idea how the legal system works.  He has no idea how laws are passed, how those laws are enforced, and who interprets those laws.  If he did have a problem with a contract, he has no idea where to go to get the problem solved because, after all, it’s not like the government can help him.

All he knows is that Contracts Are Sacred, in the same tone of voice I used to call dibs on the front seat when I was 10 years old.

No, Allen, not getting a credit card isn’t this hunky-dory, consequence-free choice that has no impact on your life.  Everyone else has pointed out that without a credit card, you have no credit history, which means that you will have trouble getting a new (or used) car, a house, or sometimes even a place to rent or a job, since some employers also do credit checks along with their background checks.

And that’s the fucking problem.  The credit card companies and financial industry have set up this arcane system by which they judge you worthy or not for getting credit, and not only do you have no say in how this system works, you can’t even find out how and by what criteria they rate you.  At least not if you don’t want to pay.

So, a system that’s built around secrecy, arbitrarily switches contract terms (often without any notice), and that is necessary for a middle class lifestyle is just fine by you, and we should all just quit our whining and cancel our cards?

I hope you never have a rough patch and end up having to live off of your credit card while you get back on your feet.

Another problem that the Libertarians don’t seem to understand is that while raising interest rates may make sense to individual creditors (because the debtor looks like a bigger credit risk), the collective effect of several creditors all raising rates at once can have the effect of dramatically increasing the debtor’s risk of default.  Thus, we have a “Tragedy of the Commons” type of situation, where all actors pursuing their own self interest result in an outcome that is bad for everyone—i.e., the debtor declaring bankruptcy. 

To us regular folks who use credit cards, it looks like this:  “because you are at greater risk of default, we will now raise your rates, thereby increasing your risk of default even further.”  The credit card companies are essentially betting that you will elect to keep your account open long enough for them to fleece you of enough money that they will come out ahead, even if you eventually default.

Of course, the solution to a Tragedy of the Commons type situation is government regulation to prevent such an occurrence.

Have the trolls given any reason the Credit Formula needs be secret? That seems to me completely a dick move with no reasoning behind it.

There’s a very good reason that the financial services industry doesn’t want to release their credit rating algorithms: embarrassingly, those formulae punish the consumer behaviours that the PR depts of those very companies define as characteristic of “responsible borrowing.” At the same time, they reward and encourage precisely the sort of irresponsible borrowing we saw over the past 8 years. In other words, releasing the algorithms would, within 24 hours of crowdsourced analysis, definitively expose these banks as a cartel of large-scale BS artists.

Try to use a credit card consistently without carrying a balance past 30 days—especially if you’re charging 5 figures a month. I can promise you that, within 6 months, you (the responsible borrower and loyal cardholder) will find yourself saddled with all sorts of fees, higher interest rates, lowered limits, and other “take a hike” nuisances. And if you try to switch to a new provider, the credit rating algorithm will also inform them of that “double-secret probation” black mark on your permanent record. So much for promoting competition.

The fact is, the CC companies don’t want “responsible borrowers”, because those borrowers are not consistently paying sucker’s interest like the shmoe who charges 4 figures a month and makes the minimum 3-figure payment every month. Of course, the banks didn’t consider the consequences of a major illness, job loss, or business failure on the shmoe’s ability to pay—L33t B-school training ensures that the geniuses in charge of these companies can’t see beyond the next fiscal quarter, and regulatory capture assures that the large incumbents are “too big to fail.”

Now you’ll never get a capital-L Libertarian to admit all of this, for fear that (in addition to providing corporate welfare) the government might step in to demand horrible anti-capitalist things like transparency and consumer rights and and contracts that aren’t non-negotiable and one-sided moving targets. Therein, they say, lies “the road to serfdom” (a chant most commonly uttered by people who are themselves already boot-licking serfs whose ownership paper is tranched amongst various corporate barons).

More viscerally, Libertarians don’t want to admit that their beloved financial services titans rely on exactly the same shady practises of information asymmetry and bait-and-switch that sustain sleazeball industries like used cars, time-share real estate, and music recording/distribution. It makes guys like Allen vewy vewy sad to see BofA, Citi and GMAC lumped in with Everglades Estates, DRM Music, and Joe’s Surefire Auto Lot.

This is why Libertarians, with their touching belief in the power and absolute benificence (and indeed existence) of perfectly free markets and their insistence that Gordon Gecko was the hero of Wall Street , continue to make the absolute best marks for the Madoffs, Dreiers and Stanfords of the world. Add an MBA credential after the Libertarian’s name, and don’t stand between him and the Ponzi schemer lest you get trampled by the latter.

Gracchus puts his (her? wev) finger right on a key element: information.

Purist economic thought, especially libertarian thought, is predicated on complete information.  (I can’t be the only one who sat through Econ101 and heard that “assumption” advanced as a caveat, over and over.)  But here in the real world, most libertarians and other market fetishists actively resist efforts to ensure transparency.  Sorry, boys, but you can’t have it both ways.  If all is to be determined in the boxing ring of the marketplace then you can’t have the rules only known to the much, much larger boxer and the refereeing left to men who are inextricably intertwined with that larger boxer’s entourage.

So Allen, ever hear of the fair credit reporting act?

Didn’t think so.

Uh, Dan, I don’t disagree with most of your post, but I would note that the Stalinist and Maoist systems really thought the only problem with “wage slavery” was the word “wage”.  Bit of a significant difference.

Gracchus puts his (her? wev) finger right on a key element: information.

“His.” And apparently you and I are not the only one who see it, or took Econ101. Here’s what people posting on the National Dialogue on Recovery government Web site think the solution involves, in graphic word cloud format. Even our free-market fetishists should be able to pick out the keywords.

But here in the real world, most libertarians and other market fetishists actively resist efforts to ensure transparency.

Come on, Allen and Libertarian, let’s hear your excuses. Don’t bother with BS like “trade secrets” and “too difficult for the layman to understand” and “operational efficiency” and “we can trust the companies,” though. And don’t blame the government, either—no-one’s saying the financial services company can’t be more transparent. You get one shot at “evil trial lawyers,” just for our amusement.

If all is to be determined in the boxing ring of the marketplace then you can’t have the rules only known to the much, much larger boxer and the refereeing left to men who are inextricably intertwined with that larger boxer’s entourage.

Fantastic analogy. With your permission, I’ll use it, replacing “much larger boxer” with “Mike Tyson,” and replacing his entourage with “Don King.” That captures the level of thuggery and corruption and lack of balance involved these days.

Now let’s watch as Allen and Libertarian, doubtless both “independent voters,” move to their fallback position: “But…but the Dems enable it, too!” they’ll whinge, as if it’s a great shocker that Biden was in the pocket of the financial services industry and as if they’ve scored some “gotcha” against the silly liberals.

the Gilded Age was not — I repeat, not — the pinnacle of free-market economic praxis

Well, for Libertarians the year 1895 was the pinnacle, but not in the way they’ll admit publicly. To a man, these morons all secretly imagine themselves as potential Morgans and Goulds, not the miserable residents of the company towns, the exploited mill workers, or the consumers with limited choices.

Forget FDR, even his Republican uncle TR understood that the system was unsustainable. Heck, a corporatist like McKinley knew it. But even their not-insignificant efforts to curtail the worst excesses of Gilded Age economics and save capitalism from itself couldn’t prevent the Depression. And here the neoCons and supply-siders and Libertarians thought that repealing Glass-Steagal and taking us back toward the “good old days” of 1895 was a good idea. That worked out really well, didn’t it?

When it comes to free market fetishists, we’re basically talking about deluded children, who (as you say) have made no real study of economics or history, who try to solve calculus problems using algebra, who will happily surrender their social liberties to any authority so long as it’s run as (or on behalf of) a for-profit enterprise, and who have a highly inflated sense of self-worth.

If all is to be determined in the boxing ring of the marketplace then you can’t have the rules only known to Mike Tyson and the refereeing left to Don King.

Yeah, you’re right.  It reads better that way, by far: better visual imagery and pithier.

Uh, Dan, I don’t disagree with most of your post, but I would note that the Stalinist and Maoist systems really thought the only problem with “wage slavery” was the word “wage”.  Bit of a significant difference.

Coropratists tried to cut out the “wage” part, too, albeit only with certain classes of citizen who were stripped of their civil rights. IG Farben, Ford Werke, and other WWII defence contractors realised some sweet labour savings as a result—no protests from them!

But Libertarians will continue to insist that only the state can oppress and enslave people.

Okay, Gracchus, that point conceded, but with the reservation that you are shifting the goalposts from communists to Nazis.  The underlying report remains valid: corporatists will exercise control of the state as best they can to minimize their labour costs.  (Ironically enough, that is well-covered in libertarian economic analysis: they call it “capture theory”.  It’s valid so far as it goes, but it misses a massive fundamental point: large governments which are involved in the marketplace can be “captured” and have the laws re-written to suit them—- and the Bush administration is a good example of the capture theory in action—- but getting rid of that large government merely causes the large corporations to shift their emphasis to direct action towards the same end without any governmental restraints.

getting rid of that large government merely causes the large corporations to shift their emphasis to direct action towards the same end without any governmental restraints.

Or sometimes, as in the case of Dearborn, MI in the early 20th century, the large corporation becomes the government.

The refereeing thing is crucial. Imagine, for example, that mandatory-arbitration clauses were governed by a rule that required each arbiter’s percentage of ruling in favor of company vs consumer to be placed by their name when an arbiter was being chosen.

And while we’re at the questions, why is it that when the consumer makes an underpayment, all costs of rectifying that situation can be charged to the consumer’s account, but when a company makes an “error” in its own favor, none of the costs of rectifying that situation can be credited? What we’d like to do is set up institutions so that there are incentives to align corporate behavior with the good of the market as a whole…

The whole “well why don’t you just live on what you make and never need a credit card??” meme is so damned annoying, try having your only vehicle fail to the tune of $3000 while your monthly income is just shy of $1000, and you still need to eat and have a roof over your head. Or medical bills. And then if you can’t drive, you can’t work, because your job is not accessible by the public transport system. What if I ever want to buy a house? Even if I could save 10% of my income, at the stage I was that would mean 100 years!
Ironically, I could only finally got a credit card after I had taken out a student loan, prior to that we couldn’t get approval for any kind of credit line, personal loan, even overdraft protection, because we had no credit history, and we couldn’t establish credit history without getting a loan!
Much as I hate paying credit fees and I do think they are unfair, I would not have a lot good things in my life such as functional car without them.

Y’know I used to feel the same way Allen did? No right to credit, don’t spend it if you can’t pay it back, blah blah and so on? Then I spent a year and a half working for MBNA, doing telephone customer service.

Folks, you haven’t lived until you’ve spent ninety minutes vainly trying to find some help for a woman who can no longer afford pain medication so that she won’t have to spend the rest of her foreshortened life screaming in pain from the cancer that’s eating her up. I called the credit department six times, too many for one call; it showed up on a report a little later on that I’d done that. She had a twenty-five-thousand-dollar line, maxed out, and all I was trying to do was shake loose a couple of grand, enough so that she could afford her next round or two of pills—I could see from the account history what they were costing her, and knew that couple of grand couldn’t have gone far, but it’d have at least been something. Of course, they said no every time. I’d have gone on trying for longer, but she told me to stop, thanked me for trying to help, said she could see it was no use, and don’t feel bad because it wasn’t my fault. And that was that.

I’ll be ashamed for the rest of my life that I didn’t walk out of that job the moment I got off that call.

Now, Allen et al, I’ve no doubt you’ll shrug this little story off as anecdata, I’m-sorry-what-a-horrible-thing-but. If you’re especially cruel, you can noodle around on the theme of how this woman was obviously nothing more than another goddam junkie, trying to scrape up the bucks to get her fix and go on sponging off all her betters, the way one of the credit personnel did on about the fourth time I called their department to try and shake a couple grand’s worth of credit line extension out of this company which claimed to be worth a hundred billion dollars.

You can say all you like that people’s credit problems are always and invariably their own stupid, thoughtless fault; I see from the thread that you do like to say such a thing. But you’re wrong. That’s all: you’re wrong. It’s that simple. I’d invite you to spend a little time actually getting to know these industrial-size usurers to whose defense you’re so quick to scramble, because you do not properly understand what you’re talking about, and, even if you can’t see it for yourself, your lack of understanding makes you a fool when you talk on the subject.

Not that you care.

MikeEss: ...should I remind you (while typing on my Ubuntu Linux box) that even things like Ubuntu have license agreements you must agree to?…

No, they don’t. A very few packages—like Mozilla—may have EULAs, but free software in general does not. (This is why Debian ships an unbranded variant.) Licenses like the GPL only restrict you insofar as you’re hacking on the software and distributing changed versions. It explicitly does not restrict you in any other way—there’s nothing you need to agree to.

This doesn’t make Allen’s point any less irrelevant, but I thought it needed to be clarified.

Aaron: I’ll be ashamed for the rest of my life that I didn’t walk out of that job the moment I got off that call.

That’s horrifying. I wish I could give you a hug. You did what you could, and you kept your humanity. I think that’s all anyone could expect.

As for credit scores, everyone here should consider an illustrative example from the Breathalyzer folks. Surprising nobody, the algorithm used was poorly written, didn’t handle errors or edge cases properly, and was chock full of easily-detectable errors. (Prior to disclosure, the manufacturer claimed that the code was of excellent quality, but that publicizing it would be bad for other, unspecified, reasons.) Given that the reaction of the credit bureaus to the thought of having their algorithms publicized has been analogous, I’d wager that said algorithms are of a similar nature.