bbgtpm

My heart breaks for you and your siblings, I'm so terribly sorry. I wonder if a better delineation might be "broken" households (divorced or not) versus functional/happy ones.

One thing I didn't mention is that as kids growing up in broken households, we often have no frame of reference so our lives feel "normal", and it's only later in life that we piece together the damage our narcissistic parents have wrought. It sounds like this may not have been the case for you and your siblings though - extremely curious as to how you see it and how your perspective has changed over time (if at all).

Oh absolutely! The psychological safety benefits of having a stable home, the ability to "be a kid" with emotional support from parents instead of having to grow up way too soon and serve as their emotional support, the luxury of not always feeling like you're waiting for "the other shoe to drop" when things are going well, having fond memories of holidays instead of anxiety-inducing split days where you feel guilty for not spending them evenly between households. Not to mention all of the logistical nightmares (never time to spend with friends because you're in transit or the parent wants to have "their" time with the kids, different rules in different households, schoolwork getting mixed up/dropped between cracks, clothing, etc.).

Even for married parents that have struggles and disagreements, the fact that they stay together serves as a rock-solid signal to a child that the family as a whole is important and that ultimately the parents care about the child even more than they care about themselves.

Except in cases of physical violence, I believe it's always better for the children if the parents stay together. And it's not close.

Also, while I'm certainly jealous of people raised in married households, I don't blame them in the slightest for not having much of a sense of how the other half lives. The only way to know is to live through it, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Right there with you, my mother entered marriage number four as I turned 10 (not a competition - at least not one I feel I won).

Hearing parents talk about how they went the extra mile to make things better for the kids after the divorce honestly strikes me about like John Wilkes Booth offering Lincoln some gauze for his head wound. Like, it's a nice gesture, but he'd probably have been better off if you hadn't shot him in the first place.

I don't think so. Money creation through loans by banks is vital to the proper functioning of the economy, but is tightly regulated by the Federal Reserve and various other agencies because unchecked lending has in the past resulted in sub-optimal outcomes. Without a banking charter, and hence access to a reserve account with the Fed, loans must be made from pre-existing capital.

Sure it can, banks would just have to modify the exchange rate between physical cash and bank deposits.

Banks allocate real resources in the economy, and the instrument by which they exercise this power is making loans (printing money) for projects they deem appropriate. I think often people get the causality backwards: banks don't have more power than other institutions and people because of their ability to loan money into being, they have the ability to make loans because of their existing power. That is, loans are merely the mechanism by which banks exert their power over resource allocation in the real economy. This Swiss referendum may put the kibosh on this particular style of loan generation, but I see no evidence that private banks won't just create a new system of loan accounting and money creation for the central bank to implement which will accomplish the same outcome within the parameters of the new referendum.