This destroys the entire economy, making startups and corporations much harder to run to the point of impossibility. Even in countries run on Sharia law, they still find proxies for interest

Those proxies tend to make the risk and liability much much clearer than usury does.

And generally speaking you can’t honestly use those proxies to build financial skyhooks

Whats a "financial skyhook"?

And where do I get one?

VCs generally fund startups by giving them funds in exchange for equity, not loans (complicated financial shenanigans aside).

They use discounted cash flows to model them, which are dependent on loans as a key component.

VCs also use loans themselves from time to time, and their investors can use loans to invest in them.

Loans by modern banks rely on the issuance of new currency; it's a scheme which relies on diluting the value of citizens' existing currency. It's unethical; it's stealing from the many to enrich the few who will receive the credit once it's spent into the economy (going into friends' businesses). Kind of like how Carl Icahn sat on the Hertz board, made Hertz take out a huge loan, used the credit to award a huge contract to one of his other businesses and then let Hertz go bankrupt.

This is so misguided. Just raising interest rates by a few points has resulted in many thousands of people losing their livelihoods in under a year, because companies could no longer justify taking out loans. What you're suggesting is eliminating loans altogether. This is a fun dorm room thought experiment, but it's not even hyperbolic to say that if it were actually pursued, it would result in a huge number of deaths by starvation.

Modern Islamic countries without usury manage to feed their citizens so although I would agree that banning loans would cause a lot of pain in the modern economy, I can't see how it would cause mass starvation.

Exactly, and even in those cases, it only serves to enrich certain people who intermediate the loans and to satiate reckless or impatient consumers. It's more like gambling; it appeals to and takes advantage of human nature but doesn't benefit the individual; it only benefits the house. It doesn't actually provide any true value to society.

This is nonsense. We're rich. Broadly.

I disagree, loans can benefit both parties if they are well regulated. In these cases loans provide a lot of value for society. Reckless loans are a symptom of an under regulated system (or in the case of the GFC, a combination of under regulation and no effective enforcement).

Your "countries with Sharia law are good" argument might not be as compelling to me as you seem to think it is... Are there any good examples of non-authoritarian non-dictatorships in this space?

Edit to add: You're right, I guess, that our government would probably take over everything and narrowly dodge mass starvation with mere mass poverty, but that doesn't sound great to me either. And mass starvation isn't so far fetched either, there have been multiple such occurrences globally within the last century.

I didn't say they were "good", I'm just pointing out that they generally aren't starving, which means your point was hyperbolic.

I don't understand why the government would need to "take over everything" to avoid starvation. There's no technical reason that capitalism can't exist without usury. Again I'm not saying usury is good or bad, just that it doesn't 'need' to exist. I suspect it is good for society when well regulated (better use of capital), and horrible for society when allowed without limit (indentured servitude, instability e.g. GFC caused by immoral lending).

The question is which world are we living in? I'd argue the West is living in the latter world, the GFC is a symptom that shows that our financial system is causing more harm than good. In this case if the US had used the Islamic system, banks would have owned the assets they were "lending" for, and so would not be incentivized to make risky loans and sell them to unsuspecting investors. A bank isn't going to give a loan on an overvalued property if they know it will sit on their books until the losses are eventually realized.

> I don't understand why the government would need to "take over everything" to avoid starvation.

If the non-starvation examples are all dictatorships, then what's your point here?

I agree that it's possible for capitalism to exist without "usury". Definitions of "usury" tend to define it as "unreasonably high interest rates". Interest rates right now are like 7%, which isn't particularly high and certainly isn't "unreasonably" high.

The GFC isn't relevant to what's going on here. This is an entirely different (indeed in many ways an opposite) set of problems.

you're responding to someone using the traditional definition of "usury", a sense already marked as obsolete in web1913: "The practice of taking interest."

that is what is prohibited in sharia, charging interest at all, not charging unreasonably high interest

plausibly the other commenter should avoid using such confusing terminology, but i found their meaning reasonably clear from context

Yeah.

My point is that banning debt wouldn't cause starvation.

Apologies for the terminology, the other commenter is right that I was using the original meaning. I don't think the rate of interest is relevant since the mechanisms that make debt dangerous still exist at 7% or 70%. Lending to a "No Income No Asset" person who has 0 chance of paying off the debt is immoral at any interest rate.

I'm interested why you think the GFC is the "opposite" problem. Immoral lending was central in that story.

Lending money is like the grease in the gears of a liberal economy. In countries with such economies, the ability to purchase food is downstream of the economy operating smoothly. If you entirely remove the grease from the gears and the economy siezes up, you do put the ability for people to get food at risk. Agricultural business rely on lending, businesses that transport goods rely on lending, businesses that sell goods rely on lending. Sure, you can potentially avoid mass starvation by having a government step in and direct all that top-down. But that has been far from a universally successful "solution" in fairly recent history.

I agree that lending to individuals without assets or income is immoral. That is a very small sliver of debt activity.

Lending to a business based on an analysis of their future earnings potential is not immoral. It is a risk, but that's the business banks are in.

Honestly in the light of the day I'm not sure what point I was trying to make about the GFC, so I'll give you that one :)

I agree with everything besides “business X relies on lending.”

Businesses _in the west_ rely on lending. Islamic businesses _cannot_ morally or legally rely on lending, so they must have alternatives. And if you look at the alternatives you will realise that debt is not essential.

Sure, if all western governments banned lending tomorrow there would be crisis, but because any major change shocks an economy, not because economies _need_ debt.

Haha I knew you’d come around about the GFC, it’s definitely not a good example of the superiority of Western Financial system LOL

Like I've been saying, businesses either rely on lending, or they rely on a state directing things from the top down. The alternatives are giant sovereign wealth funds. I think lending is much better.

I've actually come back around on the GFC thing :) The way in which it's the opposite is that with the GFC we had low inflation and high unemployment and right now we have high inflation and low unemployment.

You can keep repeating yourself, but it is still false. I've provided an existence proof of why it is false, and you have supplied..."I've been saying"

The GFC was caused by bad lending regardless of the levels of inflation and employment. Of course you are free to keep believing it's the "opposite." Doubling down on preconceived ideas is a pretty good strategy to never learn anything new. I'd prefer if you would provide a reason for your beliefs because I might learn something if your reasons contradict my own. Sorry if I sound harsh but it feels like I'm responding to an echo.

I look forward to your interview with the Taliban finance ministry and Afghan central bank - let us know how they’re doing

I must have missed this one in my Inbox - I look forward to it too haha

But to be serious, I'm not arguing that the Islamic system is "better", just that it removes certain risks that unrestricted lending cause. I don't think the solution is to ban lending but instead to be aware of the risks and make sure your regulation and enforcement is adequate.

I hate knee jerk dismissal of alternative policies, so I felt I needed to point out to the parent commenter that there are places where there is no debt, and no hunger.

Believe me I wish there was no hunger in those places too

I definitely misspoke there: I meant that they have no debt and no mass starvation. I’m aware there’s a lot of poverty in the Islamic world, but it’s not because Usury is illegal.

It isn't not because of that either.

I’d need to see some statistics to be convinced either way.

When I think of poverty, I think of sub Saharan Africa. I believe debt is legal in most of those countries, so the odds are that banning debt is a small part of the poverty picture.

Ok.

curious what are these proxies? I thought under Sharia law charging interest is "illegal"

bank buys the house and you rent-to-own it. coincidentally the total amount of the rent is higher than what the bank bought it for.

not "interest", but yea, pretty much interest

Basically identical to a mortgage where the bank has a lien on the house if you stop paying

Different mechanisms, but the most common for financing large purchases is Murabaha, which exists in the West as rent-to-own. Islamic law allows merchants to mark-up prices, to buy low and sell high, and nothing is considered wrong with that. So after a conversation at the bank, the bank buys the desired property at market value, marks up the price in a way that just so happens to be the prevailing interest rate (some literally use LIBOR+X), and lets the clients pay over time. The mark-up is not called interest, it is called a market profit on reselling. It is functionally identical to interest, but is officially not considered interest. Interestingly, banks aren't allowed to charge late fees for this under Islamic law, but as they still remain the legal owners until the entire cost is paid, they can repossess for non-payment.

Mudarabah is for companies that want loans, either startups or existing companies that want to expand. The not-a-loan is structured as a joint venture with profit and loss sharing, often with a new holding company. The bank becomes a part-owner of the holding company in a way that entitles the bank to collect profits on the joint venture up to a certain percentage of the original not-a-loan. Again, functionally identical to interest, but officially not.

It is worth noting that conservative Islamic clerics have raised objections over these, but have been overruled everywhere that money rules.

thank you very much for this explanation

i think this comment is the second most interesting one in the whole thread, following the one that pointed out that svb's stock fell 60% today (true: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SIVB/)

related links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking_and_finance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murabaha

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_and_loss_sharing#Mudara...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_and_loss_sharing#Mushar...

I assume you are trolling, but in case you are not.

How would you provide loans to help get businesses started?

How would you provide loans to people to buy their first homes?

How would you provide loans so people can afford to go to school?

How would you provide loans to buy a vehicle so people can get to/from their job before they get a paycheck?

How would farmers afford to buy land, equipment and plant crops before they got paid for selling them?

Like it or not, credit has allowed a large portion of people to get lifted out of poverty.

Savings. Frugality.

Only consuming what we can actually afford.

Investment with real skin in the game. If you have to take on much higher risk to get returns we will find ourselves being more careful about those returns actually happening.

so...it would take actual generations for people to get out of being utterly broke since in your world, you'd have to save up as a poor person to actually open up a business or do anything worthwhile. sounds so fun, sign me up. i want my family to be poor for 250 years until we finally have 2 million that we need to start that farm my great great great grandfather wanted to.

some people on this website literally live on a different planet

sadly you can remove the "on this website" qualifier from your last sentence and it holds just as well...

How easy is it for a real life poor person to just get $2M to start a farm? Almost everyone I've met with family farm inherited the land which was probably traced back to it being claimed in the frontier days.

In the agricultural corner of the world I consider my motherland, there are banks that cater specifically for farmers and fishermen. Actually, my first bank ever belong in this category, probably the biggest fish in this pond. It's honestly rather inconvenient if you are not in the agricultural demographic; if you live in the urban areas it's next to impossible finding a convenient branch.

I'm not in a position to elaborate how their loans work but they do exist and I'm also pretty sure two million of our not-USD currency is not a prohibitive amount to loan to start a farm. It's a realistic investment people in rural areas can do.

A lost folks in general (and SV in particular) operate on the principle of "got mine f you". They're comfortable so now we don't need to do anything to make anyone else so. It's a symptom of the greater issue of a lack of empathy.

> Savings.

Those savings are gonna grow at a pretty slow rate if you can't lend with interest.

Being able to create money out of thin air doesn't actually create the associated claim on value that the money represents.

So you're looking at this in terms of how you interact with money in the existing system. But all else being equal there would still be the same amount of value created & we can imagine ways that the value is distributed without the weirdness of banks & how we currently create money.

Savings are just delayed consumption.

If I want returns I should seek an investment.

In the current system (that is 'better') inflation exceeds the interest on savings, so you lose money by keeping it in a bank.

In tons of countries compound interest is a fairy tale found only in "Economy 101" books...

Savings don't grow, not in real terms and on a societal scale. A miniscule fraction of real goods and services in the economy can get buried in the basement and saved for thirty years.

my cousin's grandfather is 101 and lives in the house he lived his childhood in; i think he was born there. he and his parents have expanded the house significantly since then, as well as, of course, repairing and maintaining it. it's very comfortable now. a society that builds durable housing stock is saving up the goods and services that went into its construction

one of the things in the house is a nearly complete collection of national geographic magazines, going back before he was born; a treasury of knowledge about how people lived all over the world during that century-plus, as well as how they were seen from the point of view of the usa, ready to be perused and enjoyed at any moment without tracking cookies, broken links, images scanned at the wrong settings, or javascript incompatibilities. the images are mostly "retina display" resolution and famous for their beauty. preserving them for this century-plus has consumed very little resources

right now i'm listening to a song by rush recorded 40 years ago; every year there is a wider variety of recorded music available for me to listen to and compositions for me to sing, as long as we don't start losing it faster than it is recorded

last night i washed a shirt i got as a gift 17 years ago; if i can keep it from getting eaten by moths or sour sweat, it will surely last another 13 years

— ⁂ —

but these are mostly consumer goods, not capital goods like lathes and motorcycles; having more shirts, national geographics, or rush songs won't increase my economic productivity, which is what is needed for such savings to grow rather than shrink more slowly (though plausibly you can be more economically productive if you have a house big enough to set aside a space for sewing or grinding telescope mirrors or enlarging negatives). and for that it isn't necessary for the actual material good itself to survive for decades; it is only necessary for it to augment economic production by more than its own value during its lifetime, however short that lifetime may be

a car may have a lifetime of 10 years and, by enabling an uber driver to provide higher-value services than they otherwise could have, produce twice as much value as its inflation-adjusted cost of manufacture over that lifetime, 20% of the cost of manufacturing it every year. multiply that by the number of uber drivers in a society, and you have savings growing, in real terms, on a societal scale. and there are a thousand kinds of capital goods like this which continue to produce real value over a period of time once savings have been invested in them: house insulation, refrigerators, washing machines, olive trees, engine lathes, kitchen knives, electric drills, laptops, and so on. even factors of production that are consumed within a few months or a year can qualify, like knitting yarn

(however, a drill you buy, use once, and then leave in the garage and never use again does not; it may not be decaying very fast but it's not growing)

this is how a society can grow its savings in real terms on a societal scale, through accumulating capital goods and knowledge so that its productivity can increase over time

Nice stories, and I don't doubt that some money can be productively invested. But does the marginal dollar saved wind up in a productive investment, or does it wind up malinvested? In other words, is money the bottleneck for increasing productivity, or is it figuring out improved processes and predicting the future economic landscape?

most of it gets wasted

but money is not really a bottleneck or a resource; it's just a way to keep score

making a loan is an investment with real skin in the game

What you've just created is a world in which the only people who can afford to buy a home are people with rich families they can borrow money from. Congratulations, you've concentrated wealth in even fewer hands.

Low interest rate debt turned housing into a lending arms race to see how deep you can bury yourself.

There are other ways. Like buying one brick at a time. It's a real thing in places where access to lending is less common.

I've lived in homes built that way. They're always a little janky, but usually much higher quality overall because they're built for a family and not for quick turnaround.

I know guys who are literally growing the timber for their dream home while they live in a singlewide. Lifestyle inflation in the USA is caused in large part by access to this easy debt, and it routinely ruins people in the bottom half of the income distribution.

so the economy grows annually at ~0.0% meaning no real value gets created because productivity basically never improves and labor participation tanks

congratulations, you've taken us back to Feudalism

This is incorrect, in standard macroeconomics, credit theoretically has no effect on the long term growth rate of an economy. The only thing that grows an economy are increases in worker productivity, theoretically driven be technological advancement. See https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2015/june/what-dri...

Loans are just move the money around and create “business cycles” of booms and busts. Which in my opinion exacerbate wealth inequality as opposed to reduce it.

I'd say that's a crude reductionist view. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/2118406 to name one paper but there's tons of research on the link between capital markets and economic growth

What part of that crude or reductionist? Technological progress being the sole driver of growth is the dominant view in macroeconomics. Even the paper you link attests to that.

It's reductionist because "technological progress" is too broad a stroke. "Productivity" is not directly observable or measured, right?

Access to inexpensive capital is a key driver of technological progress.

Robust capital markets allow for more efficient allocation of savings into business ventures, driving productivity forward

Owners typically have skin in the game now as those that provide a loan.

There's a reason that people don't save up the purchase price of a home in order to buy it. They are willing to pay a serious premium in terms of Interest so that they can have a home today instead of waiting 15 years for 30 years in order to purchase a property.

If you want a car to get to a job and make money, you want it now, and are willing to pay more later. Without the car, you wont be able to work and save.

How would you pay for university? How would you buy a house? How would a company build a factory?

You would have to use the money you inherited or were given annually from your parents more carefully so that you have it to spend on the things you really need or where you see a big opportunity. It's a sacrifice but it's all worth it in the end to get rid of fractional lending, which I find confusing and distasteful.

Sell equity stakes or form a joint partnership. This is exactly how most startups get funding.

Also, it’s not clear to me that credit has lifted people out of poverty; I’d argue that interest based lending has kept people in poverty, transferring wealth to those who already have it.

I dunno, people buying a house (and the mortgage that goes with it — their biggest loan of their life) is (to me) a good thing, rather that everyone a renter.

Why though? It perpetuates real-estate bubbles by incentivizing a large portion of the populace to speculate on non-productive assets. If real estate weren’t so highly incentivized in the US, I’d rather be a renter with a long term lease with all its legal protection and invest my money in a business or something. We’d have a much larger renting class and likely would be able to push through much more renter friendly policies. As it stands, majority of Americans act like bourgeoisie when they really aren’t.

The end game of everyone is a renter is the government owns all residential.

When you have everyone is a renter, then renters change laws to make it not profitable for people to own rentals which the government eventually picks up. I don’t know anyone from eastern block countries living in the Soviet time that wants anything like that.

Why does a business need a loan? They can just sell shares/equity to raise funds. It's better in every way; there's skin in the game. Why would anyone even want to loan money to a startups? If the startup founders go out of business and flee the country, the lender loses everything. The downside is unlimited. Yet if the startup does well and it becomes a billion dollar company, the lender will get maybe 20% return on their loan; the upside is limited. There is a reason why independent people invest their money in startups as opposed to loaning them money... It's only banks and big institutions which loan money to private equity to go towards startups; and it's never their own money... It's typically the public's money (as bank loans represent newly printed credit which dilutes the value of citizens' currency). Nobody in their right mind would loan their own cash to a startup at sub-8% annual ROI when inflation is 8%+... In the best possible case, you end up with the same amount of buying power as you started with; in the worst case, you lose everything.

As for car loans and home loans... Similar thing. If people couldn't get loans for houses, real estate prices would have to come down to an affordable level that people could save for. If people couldn't get a loan for a car which they need as part of their small business, they could sell equity in their business to raise money for the car.

The question above are circular. How would people get loans if loans didn't exist? They wouldn't, we don't need them and society would be better off.

I think that's a possible answer worth discussing , but nothing precludes that now. There's a reason why people don't crowdsource shares in their house when they want to buy it or if they're business when they create it. Sometimes they would rather pay the interest than share their asset. Sometimes there is a lack of Interest in people wanting a steak

Well before mortgages home ownership was about 2% and we had a very small number of people who owned all the real estate because people couldn’t afford it without a loan.

If your happy with going back to this that is your perogative but I would Be against your world view.

A house would only cost around 5 years' worth of the median salary. Now it's like 15 years and that doesn't even account for the fact that taxes are way higher today and so it's much harder to save... With modern tech, things should be a lot better but for most people, it's worse, much worse.

Salaries have not being keeping up with productivity gains as the economy has become anti-competitive by design. Every time money changes hands, it gets taxed maybe 30% on average... By the time $100 has changed hands 10 times, there is only $3 left out of it for the people (the rest went to the government). It centralizes everything around the government; money cannot flow too far from it. The modern economy is a giant social scheme with 0 merit. For many, it's hell on earth.

Could you please share where you got that measure of “2% home ownership” before mortgages?

These would be good questions to ask an undergraduate microeconomics professor. They have answers. It's not that nobody has ever thought about this before.

I know the answer; it's because being able to issue unlimited money, diluting the public's savings and salaries and then collecting interest on it benefits certain powerful people in a risk-free manner. That's not the answer which an economics professor would give me though. They are not trained to use their analysis skills so much as providing canned explanations. These economics professors have to pay their bills too and their paychecks come from the people earning interest on the big loans... The paychecks of economists literally come from this system that they're suppose to analyze in an unbiased way. Not going to happen.

Damn it can someone please just give me free money so I don't have to participate in this system and don't have to think about it every day? Maybe if I could also benefit from it without having to work, it would be easier to just let it be. It's exhausting to get screwed every day and knowing exactly how I'm being screwed and yet having no power to do anything about it except whining online to random people hoping desperately that the system will improve just enough that I can get the tiniest opportunity. I've been working on side hustles for 10 years straight but I've never had the social connections to get traction regardless of how good the product is or how much users love it.

This is a very good Dunning-Kruger effect example. You aren't being screwed, you are swimming in water you can't see.

It's not about information. It's about social connections; that's how you get opportunities. Information and intelligence is worthless and a pretext.

If I befriend Elon Musk and he makes one tweet about any of my existing projects, I'll be a millionaire within a year. 100% guaranteed. I wouldn't have to change anything or know anything more. Then I would have impostor syndrome instead.

It's easy to claim that anyone who receives help and has it easy 'suffers' from impostor syndrome and anyone who doesn't receive any help suffers from Dunning-Kruger effect. I know how this works. Only those who really struggled can see all sides; that's because nobody tries to hide anything from you; there is no incentive to.

You're wrong about whether fractional reserve banking is broadly good for people living in developed economies - it is - but you're unlikely to be talked out of this conspiracy kick you're on, so :shrug:. All the best to you!

Well it's not good for me and I'm merely a typical product of this system. The system will make plenty more of me. I was totally alone a few years ago, now I look like a moderate. Unfortunately, future contrarians may not be as curious, tolerant and understanding as me so they will probably end up blaming capitalism as a whole and demand communism... China will swoop in and 'liberate' the people. When this happen, I will be shrugging my shoulders in complete apathy due to moral exhaustion.

If intelligent people cannot separate the monetary system from capitalism, the average person won't either.

It is good for you. The fact that there is a thriving economy, that there are lots of businesses to work for, that you can start a business if you want to and get money from a bank to do so, this is all very good for you.

But sure, keep wishing we could go back to feudalism or whatever, great plan!

I don't think we should abolish lending, but all those things would be vastly cheaper in a miserly debt free economy

Thing is, I want to start a business but need several hundred thousand USD in machinery. Lathes or bakery ovens are not free after all. I don't have that right now, and if I need to save up for several decades the opportunity will have passed. How do I convince people to lend me money without any interest?

You can replace "want to start a business" with "want to buy a house" if you prefer.

that machinery being so expensive is part of a long tradition of 'developed countries' (powerful peoples) wielding power over other weaker countries by means of technological availability restrictions.

The history of the textile industry is but an instance of this historical pattern of behavior.

all I'm saying is that it's all part of the same 'power system' of government and order.

in the end, interests is comparable to imposing a rent on upon time usage. i.e. interest forces us to pay with money for the time we live (or time we spent), regardless of whether we are working or doing whatever, regardless of where we are as long as we are under the influence of money created through loans with interest.

that we must pay taxes on top of the interest exacted from all of us is just a cherry on top.

> that machinery being so expensive is part of a long tradition of 'developed countries' (powerful peoples) wielding power over other weaker countries by means of technological availability restrictions.

I'm having real trouble unpacking what you mean here. Machinery is expensive because... there's a worldwide cartel keeping prices up to keep out new players? Could it also be that making machines is hard and requires a lot of research/labor/material?

> there's a worldwide cartel keeping prices up to keep out new players?

yes that's what i'm saying, have you ever heard about the real (as in royal) spanish mafia? or the english one? what about any famous german cartels? no? me neither, because those are all part of 'legitimate' government i.e.. they're the 'mafia' that won last.

re-adjusts tinfoil h̶a̶t̶crown

If 30 year housing loans were not available, housing would be a lot cheaper.

Can't be cheaper than the materials and labor costs to build it. If house prices get too cheap house builders / contractors will stop building. This will pinch supply and keep house prices high enough that only cash rich (corps and banks) can afford them. Most people will have no choice but to rent indefinitely. Those who manage to save up some $400k may finally afford to buy a house just in time for retirement.

But if house prices (and therefore rents) go down, people will need lower salaries for an equally comfortable life, pushing labour costs down, making housing cheaper. Man economics is easy

Why would rent go down if a substantial part of the market is owned by a monolith (banks/institutional investors) who can impose price control? This is already slowly happening.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/how-wall-street-bought-singl...

No, but there would be a lot more renters.

Or, and this seems far more likely, it would be owned by a very small group of people or corporations or the government.

Someone will always have money.

The system we have now may not be perfect but it a far far more egalitarian than the past when there were no loans

Canada would like a word.

Aren't a lot of companies given large amounts of capital at the early stages of the company which are not interest-earning loans?

Well they are hardly "given" any capital, they sell part of themselves for money. The VCs don't do it out of the goodness of their heart, they expect to get back more later. In any case if loans were not available and equity investments (by people who are already rich and thus have money to spare for investments) were the only way to fund capital intensive new companies, that would make my point even more.

Well, a lot of religions created before the modern era of banking say that lending with interest is a sin, and there are some people that still believe it.

Also, most of the Muslim world works off of banking without usury.

Most of the Muslim world just offers financial products that have "fees" coincidentally exactly equal to the interest a non-Muslim bank would charge.

Correct, but those financial products don't have a tendency to combine in weird ways the way interest bearing systems do.

I've flagged this. Please read the HN rules

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The comment I responded to advocates for a world where this forum would never have existed. I could have been less snarky, but I am genuinely mystified how someone could have posted such a thoughtless and unsubstantiated comment and seemingly not even realized it.

Here come all the very smart economics 101 graduates to explain why rich people should be paid for owning money while everyone else is forced to sell their labor for a wage under threat of homelessness

Please don't post flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. We're trying for something different here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35087135.)

What exactly is the substance of this post you've just made? Just attacking the parent with no argument?

Perhaps I should have spelled out the argument more explicitly: taking this thread on the generic flamewar tangent of "lending is evil" is so off-topic and so inflammatory as to be trollish in effect if not in intent. It's exactly the thing the site guidelines ask commenters not to do here - note this from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

But you have a good point anyhow: moderation responses are tedious, repetitive, and mostly uninteresting, so in that sense there isn't a lot of substance in what I posted. However, at a meta level they're signals to the community (not just the commenter being replied to) about the kind of culture we want here, and in that way they're important.

In case it helps at all, moderation comments are even more tedious to write than they are to read (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Unfortunately, I don't know how to preserve this forum for its intended purpose without posting a lot of them. They're neither on topic nor interesting; rather, they're an out-of-band feedback mechanism without which the system would rapidly degrade (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). That's the theory, at least.

The system isn't self-regulating; I wish it were. If we could get by with just community mechanisms (like upvotes and flagging) plus software, that would be awesome. Then I could just work on the code! Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way—there needs to be humans in the loop to jig the system out of its failure modes. So for better or worse you're stuck with this kind of thing.

I think I'd rather share my opinions actually.