This is a dumb take.

Canada has a very cushy social safety net and still has payday lending with interest rates of 49%.

And the alternative of having payday lending is no lending - that is, these folks would have no way of getting a short term loan. Is that better?

I think there's a middle ground between "unrestricted predatory lending" and short term lending. The payday loan industry spends a lot of money on lobbying to push things to the former end (see attached article about 1000% interest rates), and have been very successful [1]. (But the overall lack of a social safety net in the US is due to moneyed interests that go well beyond the payday loan industry.)

Yours is a typical HN binary take that holds a thing must be an utterly unalloyed good or it must be banned, there's no middle ground for a thing to be useful when moderated and regulated, and predatory in other circumstances. This is a very common intellectual failure mode.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/us/politics/payday-lender...

> Is that better?

Usually.

Indeed if payday lenders are profitable then they are extracting welfare from the worst off.

Huh? If the poor by Apple phone is able extracting welfare from them?