* The ACLU opposes censorship of library books, but supports making libraries unbearable to visit by representing horrible-smelling homeless people who want to hang out all day in the library.
In my experience, librarians are really nice people. I trust them to not wantonly kick people out who are not causing any harm or disruption. But the ACLU is OK with turning them into de facto homeless shelters / bum-computer-porn-masterbation safe places.
* People generally get the interest rates they deserve.
* Rip-off loans is where banker scumbaggery and IQ denialism profitably intersect.
Good paternalistic liberals like Senator Warren just want to ban payday loans, which often feature 7,000% interest rates.
The banks, however, insist the solution is “financial education.” Rather than cap interest rates, let’s protect the IQ<85 set by forcing schools to try to teach them concepts like present value, compound interest, and amortization. * No they give good rates because they know Blacks and Hispanics aren’t good loan prospects, many lie out their ass, are flakey and often abuse the merchandise or just drive it down to Mexico where it disappears and the driver vanishes. Or they let it get stolen and stripped to the frame, The frame ends up at a auto salvage auction where it’s sold for pennies on the dollar to the same people who stole and stripped it. Since they have all the parts, they put it back together and sell it for a nice profit and it’s legal as can be. I used to see it all the time at the auctions. No one dared bid on the frames except the thieves. Now some dealers make serious bank dealing with deadbeats. We got this one dealer where I live who specializes into selling and scamming deadbeat Mexicans and Blacks and it’s made him rich. First off he does his own financing(which looks good but isn’t), two he installs a tracker in each vehicle so he knows where they are at all times. When a buyer has trouble making payments, he calls them in saying the car is due for a free preventative maintenance check, the driver shows up, he escorts him/her into a office, while a employee repossessed the car. When the buyer walks out the car is gone. Then the car is cleaned up and put back on the lot for sale. * When I was still in high school I would sub in for my older sister who taught remedial math at the local community college. (It was a small town in the 90′s, things like that happened.) The students were working adults who wanted to better themselves going to school at night, and it was just heartbreaking to see them unable to do long division and multiplication of 3 digit numbers when they really tried hard to do so. These are the people the payday loan scumbags target. The ones who have a steady paycheck than can steal away so easily by having them sign forms they don’t understand. Another prime target for high-interest loans are fresh military recruits, often 18-year-olds from rural areas who have never had a bank account, and are seduced by retired officers who sign up as the salesmen for payday loan places and sleazy auto lenders. * I am not libertarian, but I find that laws seldom prevent stupid people from doing stupid things. It seems to me that, when looking at out-of-wedlock birth rates and such historically, there was a time when even the “IQ<85 set" didn't engage in as reckless behaviors as they do now. The answer seems to be social-cultural constraint of negative (short-sighted) behaviors, rather than arbitrarily capping numbers (which, once established as a precedent, can always be set lower still). When the "IQ<85 set" had intact families and fathers at home, they seemed to have learned through oral tradition if not school home economics classes that obtaining usurious loans was not a good idea. * Back when I first started buying cars, with no down payment, no credit rating, and desperate because I was married with small children, I ended up paying a 40% markup from the list price over the course of a loan. Decades later, I end up paying 7% over markup over the course of the loan; and if I don’t get to do it my way, I leave. People get charged higher rates not because they are black but because they are poor credit risks and also because the customers will take whatever they can get. If you have an established credit rating with no defaults or bankruptcies you are in a far better position to call the tune. The other reason why these bad deals go through is because people are not only innumerate but they are embarrassed that they are innumerate and don’t bother to take a break or use a calculator to figure out exactly how much they will be paying over the course of the loan. In his reparations pitch, Ta Nehisi Coates extends this to home mortgages, as well. But, let’s face it, slavery is no excuse for being bamboozled in a financial transaction. Now, if someone decides that predatory lending practices should cease, OK, but don’t make an affirmative action case out of it. There are plenty of innumerate white people who are prone to making poor financial decisions, too. It is frankly insulting to everybody, and in particular black people, to act as though black people are uniquely stupid such that they have to be protected from poor financial decisions. * Holder’s DOJ is the kind of organization that would litigate over ‘food deserts’, forcing supermarket companies to open new stores, and then sue them because they raised prices due to shoplifting: To lure the shoppers, the department said, the markets were situated in overwhelmingly African-American neighborhoods. * I dated an hispanic girl, first generation, worked a white collar job, worked check to check, lived in an expensive apartment. She got a settlement for a car accident she was in and was awarded $50K. Immediately, she was making plans on how to dole out her “winnings” to her immediate family, and to spend it on frivolities. She was in her early twenties. This was in 1995. I told her if she put some money aside into the stock market, and pretended she didn’t have it for at least ten years, she’d have a nice nest egg for her to retire. She couldn’t deal with the idea. I told her to buy 1K shares of Apple when it was at 15, btw. Had she done what I advised, since apple has quintupled the stock since then, and added dividends, she would currently have no financial worries, and a money tree of dividends every quarter. She doled it all out to her relatives, and on a fancy vacation, blowing the entire amount in a year. She still lives in an apartment, not much savings, living check to check. I explained all she needed to know. The what, how, and why of it, over and over and over. She was too stupid to hear a thing. So this “educate them” business isn’t all some make it out to be. If you’re too stupid, you will sit and nod your head while something is explained to you, and you will still do the stupid thing. * I bought a pretty nice used car last year and paid precisely what I considered its reasonable value. Afterward, I was bragging to a buddy who’s an ad man about my hard negotiation tactics and he said, “We’re the sort of customers that dealerships hate, because we actually know what the car’s worth”– “we” meaning white guys. He explained that black guys pay a good deal more than it’s worth “and not because of racism, but because they want to brag about how much they paid.”
