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[-] Emi@ani.social 1 points 4 months ago

Most important? I'll never go into debt, just won't spend money I don't have. It's a no brainer for me.

[-] markovs_gun@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

Do you own a home? Do you think that's a worthwhile thing to do? Without debt, home ownership is basically completely out of reach for most people despite the fact that many people will earn enough money to buy a house in their lifetime. It allows you to pay for money now with money later. Debt is legitimately an extremely important part of an economy- there's a reason it's been invented by pretty much every agricultural society in history. As with most financial instruments, it started with farmers - it costs money to plant and grow a crop of grain, but that crop doesn't produce money until you sell it at harvest time so you have an issue where if last year's crop didn't go so well due to weather and you are low on cash in the spring, you can't afford to plant next year's crop and get out of the hole. So borrowing money is the easiest way.

This also works with businesses and governments. Say you want to buy a machine that prints designs on T shirts because you want to sell T shirts. You can't afford the machine now, but you believe that you'd be able to with the money you could make from your T shirt business, so you go to the bank and convince them of the plan, and they give you money up front. Without debt, that T shirt business couldn't happen unless you got a bunch of investors to help you out.

[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 0 points 4 months ago

I wonder what the housing market would look like if individuals couldn’t get mortgages, but investors couldn’t either?

Availability of credit has a huge impact on prices, and landlordism is mostly founded on cheap credit.

[-] markovs_gun@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

There are many examples of this being essentially the status quo in many places and historical eras and essentially it just makes housing availability worse since only the ultra wealthy can afford to build expensive structures and they just accumulate more wealth and power. Think about in the middle ages when a local lord would have to foot the bill to build townhouses completely up front but he and his descendants would retain ownership of them and demand payment to live in them for hundreds of years to come. There are places where access to credit is poor today where people basically live in makeshift shacks if they don't rent because they can't afford to buy houses otherwise. There are a lot of ways to fix land ownership and exploitation by landlords, but historically speaking, this was not it. I know nobody likes living in debt and debt can be used for exploitation, but completely abolishing credit simply will not have good outcomes as a whole.

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 0 points 4 months ago

Feudalism had a lot of good points structurally, replace the lord with public servants and I don't see the problem. The city builds the housing, and it becomes part of the tax revenue forever. If the city prices basic housing too high, economic activity falls, tax revenue falls, and the city declines

Shanty towns aren't good, but we haven't fixed the problem, we just have homelessness now

[-] markovs_gun@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

Debt is bad, fuedalism is good. Got it lmao.

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 1 points 4 months ago

Feudalism didn't make us destroy the entire world, did it?

What were doing clearly isn't working, maybe there's something to democratic feudalism. Seriously, it fixes a lot of issues and all I see are engineering problems

[-] psx_crab@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 months ago

Most important, because that's how most people start and grow their business, they don't have multimillion inheritance.

Also buying house.

[-] tequinhu@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

You (and the other guy that replied) are indeed thinking of usury (which is a very evil thing, even frowned upon by most religions), which is the situation of lending assets to for the sake of profit

Debt on the other hand is a more general concept, did you ever borrow a pen from another person? While you were writing you were in debt for that pen (but this is a silly example that can be disregarded)

Did your parents take care of you as a child? In most cultures, thar means you're in debt and owe them care when they get old (though I understand that this varies from culture to culture, but the idea is there anyway) If you are friendly to your neighbors and they invite you home to dinner several times, you are also expected to pay back the favor sometime down the road, this is another form of debt

To sum it up, debt is much more intrinsic to our behavior as humans than we usually think, even though "formal debt" might not be

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social -3 points 4 months ago

This is not debt, and I maintain my point. Debt is wrong

If you lend out your pen and they break or lose it, a little bit of trust between you dies. And this is something inevitable over time. If you give your pen to them and they give it back once they get their own pen, trust is built. If they don't, that's fine too... Because you gave it to them

You can't count favors, and you shouldn't have debts. Debts ruin relationships, it feels bad from both sides. It feels bad to know they owe you, it feels bad to owe a debt. It feels like a relief to have it paid back, but it doesn't feel good

You should help people, but when you give someone money to start their business you should never expect it back. You can spread ideas like honor and gratitude, but if the business fails you shouldn't feel like you lost something

If you take care of your parents because they raised you like a child, you're asking for elder abuse. In these cultures, the parents try to chip in however they can... In hard times historically they'd wander out into the wilderness to avoid burdening the family.

But the term for this is not debt, it's duty. A good person is patient with their children and their parents. A good person does what they can for their family, the whole way through

Shitty people take out their anger on their children and resent their parents for every bite of food

[-] tequinhu@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

Fair enough, I can agree on some points, and agree to disagree on others, I believe our conceptions largely align even though the labeling is different

[-] iii@mander.xyz 1 points 4 months ago

It is debt, even if you fail to see that :)

[-] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

Even if you're able to make that work on an individual level (never buy a home, don't get higher education, make sure you don't need a car), you can't make it work on a societal level.

If you want to contribute to supplying houses to people, you need to build the houses before you can sell/rent them (mostly). That means you need to take up a loan to pay for everything involved in building houses. Then you can sell/rent the houses to individuals that don't want to take up loans. Regardless of whether you personally ever take up a loan, you likely wouldn't have housing without someone doing it (unless you live on a family farm from waaay back), because the people that built it needed a loan to do so.

[-] Emi@ani.social 1 points 4 months ago

The only expense for school besides the usual stuff(paper and pencils and such) were textbooks.

[-] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

Idk about you, but while I was getting my free engineering degree in Norway I still had to pay for rent and food.

In principle, I could have studied part-time instead of full time, while working some job that doesn't require a degree, but I don't see how that would benefit anyone. Regardless, even if you have housing and food covered while studying, you still need money for books, paper, a computer, etc. so either you need a job (which, for a lot of degrees, means you'll be studying part-time), or you need a loan.

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 1 points 4 months ago

You don't need a loan, you need somewhere to live and food

Maybe students just get free dorms and a meal plan by default, and we work that into the cost of education and pay for it as a society

this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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