The Economy

I'm genuinely interested. Why do you think interest is the devil?

 

I'm not the one "blaming" people (at the individual decision-making level) for anything.

You are the one who makes absolute kinds of statements. ... like, "Interest is the devil."

To me? Money has a time value. You're getting something in the present, but you are being allow to defer paying for it into the future. ... Interest is the cost.

That isn't inherently a bad OR good thing.

Where I do have a problem is when the price signals that markets give people to guide their decision making are intentionally destroyed (for short-term sugar highs or promises of false prosperity), and the mispricing of money creates distortions that lead to the kind of behavior that always creates very serious economic problems later. Booms (sugar highs) and busts (credit crises / forced deleveraging) aren't just exhausting, we're much worse off over time for them. There is a huge opportunity cost that people don't understand (because they can't see what wasn't allowed to happen) of the more economically productive things we could have had instead of the epic malinvestment that is created because the cost of money has been mispriced to make it too cheap, and therefore people don't value it enough.

Those people who don't value it enough aren't morally suspect to me. Sorry. I'm not a fire and brimstone Sunday morning preacher about this, because they are valuing the money exactly the way the market signals are telling them to value it.

If you think that is the problem (because of the aggregate effects it always leads to), and if you want to really address it, wagging your finger seems silly to me. For me the place to direct your attention is the idiocy that hijacks the most important price there is (the cost of money), and purposely doesn't allow millions of people to determine that price themselves with their own decision making (about how much THEY value things). It's a natural regulator.