FBXL Social

I had a dream last night where a couple big burly guys pushed themselves into our house and started demanding millions of dollars on the spot.

After I woke up, it occurred to me that this will be the reality for a lot of Canadian homeowners who see their mortgages renewing at rates they can no longer afford to pay on amounts no individual human being should ever consider borrowing.

You can sympathize with someone for the consequences of bad choices without condoning the choices themselves.

My brother has a master's in english literature. Almost as bad an idea as a middle class person buying a million dollar single family home in the greater toronto area.

True.

The other side of freedom is responsibility. Responsibility to make sure you understand the choices you make because at the end of the day you're the one who gains for your good choices and loses for your bad choices.

Unfortunately, something is broken in Canadian culture that makes people think taking out a million dollars of debt at any rate is a good idea.

I mean, imagine paying for a 3000/mo mortgage. For 98% of people that's going to mean all you have is a house. God help you if the water tank or the furnace or something else breaks!

Well... Until they make it my business by demanding the rest of the country bail them out...

That's where a lot of this "it's none of your business" breaks down. Suddenly all these "it's none of your business" types want to make it my business by having the people who didn't make the mistake pay for it.

I locked in my mortgage for 10 years, and in my age group only something like 3% of people opted for a mortgage like that. It was an extra percent or two, but much beyond that you're paying like 8%. Which at the rate we're going might be a bargain...

I certainly have strong libertarian sympathies, though the world's more complicated than a single data point.

Unfortunately, a lot of the problems were caused in the name of preventing harm. A bank would be considered a fairly high risk endeavor but for the massive amounts of insurance that the governments of the world give to banks.

Part of the problem is that they go "The government will pay for it", without asking "Who is paying for the government?"

For most of history, the answer to "who is paying for the government?" was "The people" who were paying taxes, but now it's even worse -- we're paying for government with debt we never intend to pay back, so the answer to "Who is paying for the government?" is "three generations of unborn children", but nobody thinks about that because they act like the money always comes from someone else who deserves to pay for it more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMnicq4w7LM

It's more that you've got to be careful not to get too pidgeonholed into one ideology or another completely, because then people can start getting you to argue for stances you don't agree with just because it's part of the ideology broadly speaking.

In my case, I do support limited scope, sustainably funded, competently run government programs. Hell, I support Canada's single payer healthcare where it's competently run, and that's about as far from libertarian as you can get. My city has a bunch of locally funded programs I totally support despite the cost because they're a public good that don't exist when someone needs to make a profit to do a thing (public parks and playgrounds being a good example)

So that's the thing, the world is complicated and because of that you often and up having a variety of viewpoints that are sometimes mutually exclusive but battling it out because those different values despite being contrary are both important to a person.

You can amortize for up to 35 years if you come up with a 20% down payment, but the 30 and 40 year interest rate terms are something subsidized by the US government to help get people into houses. You can get a 25 year interest rate term in Canada, but the premium is so high it's unreasonable to go with it. To give you an example, you can get a mortgage for 4-5% right now if you're 0-5 years, but a 25 year mortgage is 9.75%.

This actually makes sense since prior to the gfc the average mortgage rate was about 9%, but it's awfully expensive insurance!

I dunno. I can't find it, but I was sure there were specific things in US law that made a 30 year mortgage economical whereas in reality it's an absurdity where the bank is taking huge amounts of risk assuming that the interest rates won't go up for 30 whole years.

In Canada, once you get much past 10 years the interest rates are so high nobody would possibly accept such a term. I looked around in England, and it appeared that 10 years was about the maximum there too. The fact that mortgage term and rate term are so close linguistically makes it hard to find information about it...

Maybe that's it then. @cjd made a god tier post thread a couple days ago about banking that I need to get back to that talks a lot about the damaging effects of having all this debt available, but the availability of 30 year fixed terms at anything other than the historical average mortgage rate is sort of absurd.

Although I don't follow Confucianism, one important detail of their ideology puts farmers at the top of the civilian hierarchy.

We don't live in an agrarian society like ancient China, but I think the idea of putting the people who actually do things on a pedestal is smart. People who package up financial instruments may make a lot of money, but to consider people who play magic tricks with dollars more important than people who make the things we use every day is a decadent and broken society imo...

Are you sure they benefit, or do we just think they do because that's how it's been done in our lifetime?

Especially considering that it's really questionable as to whether the next few generations will be able to retire...

But when the financial system is set up so that every day the dollars you save are worth less than they were yesterday, and lately significantly so, how exactly are you supposed to keep up? With sound money, your argument is sensible. When the government is printing more money than exists in short periods of time, when debt levels soar among governments, companies, and individuals driving up prices, how do you make sure you keep your money in a form you can retire with?

If you had $100,000 last year, then you have $90,000 in buying power this year. And that's with numbers that are unquestionably fudged. Critical stuff like food, shelter, and energy is up way more than a mere 10%. My first house rental was for $775/mo. That was about 12 years ago. Today, you can't get the same house for less than $2,000/mo.

This is happening in large part because of banks creating money in overwhelming amounts, driving us further into debt, which drives up prices and our cost of living, driving us further into debt.

Once you realize how it all works, it's enormously parasitic.

People blame the young for not having kids, but (as I've mentioned in another post), rents have gone up stratospherically, as well as food, as well as energy, as well as transportation, meanwhile wages have stagnated. In an environment like that, it's totally rational not to have kids because a responsible individual knows they can't afford it.

Historically, periods of economic decline for the common man like we're in tend to lead to bad outcomes. One of the most famous examples would be the french revolution, the russian revolution, the iranian revolution(though arguably that was a glowie op), and some of the revolutions in the 2010s in africa and the middle east, not to mention the coup in sri lanka.

That's a good point, but I think it goes beyond simple women's liberation to a society that actively shames women for just wanting to be a stay at home mother. My wife actively lies to people when they ask because she's so sick of people treating her decision to be a housewife like it isn't a valid life choice.

That being said, I think you could say both things may be related. Women were being liberated just as much or in some ways more in the 1940s than they are today (proportionately speaking), but there was literally a baby boom.

And the most toxic thing is that these women don't have kids, then realize they're going to die out and their ideology will die out with them, so they start trying to indoctrinate *our* kids.

Fuck off, you made your choice.