Credit card companies, a blight on humanity

One of the things I wish I had a magic wand I could wave to cause happen, just to see what the after effects would be, would be to erase all credit card companies from the face of the Earth. I'm curious what the sudden lack of expensive credit would do to society. We've developed this bizarre economical view where when people spend beyond their means, say for the Christmas shopping season, then we're told that the economy is strong. Somehow the mountain of debt being built up doesn't register.

I'm essentially outraged that credit card companies have managed to embed themselves as far into American society as they have. The problem is that they've managed to oblige people to use them, they've managed to create negative consequences for people who don't bring them profit.

I dislike credit cards and don't use them, as a rule. I simply don't understand the point. You essentially use them for a short term loan to pay for everyday purchases that you could have paid for with cash. THEN you pay them back, often paying back more than you spent because of assorted fees. Yet it's not even limited to that, what people in the modern age seem to have forgotten (except those working in the retail sector) is that not only do you pay fees directly to your credit card company, but you indirectly pay them because all merchants that accept credit cards have to pay money to the credit card companies for every transaction they make. There's only one place this money can come from, the customer. You don't see it, but every price at the supermarket has been marked up to take this into account. What's worse is that people like me who pay in cash essentially subsidize the costs, helping to pay OTHER people's credit card fees.

I'm barely old enough to remember the day when some prices, especially gasoline, were available in both credit and cash versions. I now know that that practice is still (barely) alive today, I saw an interstate highway gas station that listed separate cash and credit prices.

It's not just that that really outrages me though. For people like me who don't see the point of credit cards are penalized in another way for not doing business with those parasites upon modern society. Let's say I find myself in the market for buying a house. My lack of credit history will make it difficult to get a loan. At best it'll mean that any loan I can get will have a higher interest rate. Isn't that convenient for the credit card companies? If I don't voluntarily waste money on an unnecessary service then I have to pay more money for something else. How convenient for the credit card companies that being THEIR customer has become the measure of a good citizen. Of course it's a power structure that they invented from the ground up, the entire thing was planned, but somehow no-one thought that allowing them to do that might be a bad thing.

It's bad enough that that sort of information has become key to getting a loan. Now all manner of businesses are using the information from the credit bureaus. Applying for a job? If you're not a customer in good standing with the credit card companies then you're penalized. Yes, somehow that sort of information is deemed valid for judging the ability of job applicants.
Shopping for car insurance? Guess what? Now they use your credit history to influence your rates. Just one more avenue of society controlled by the credit card companies. Use their product or else you have to pay a premium for other products. It's financial blackmail, fully endorsed by the government that's received thousands of dollars in donations from, guess who, credit card companies.


My feeling on capitalism is simple. It's a fine concept, so long as the government controlling it is willing to step in to protect THE PEOPLE when such protection is necessary. There's nothing about the fundamental concept of capitalism that enforces ethics, it's up to outside regulation to protect the consumers from the corporations. In cases like this the government has been happy to slurp up the bribes.. er, donations, from such entities as the credit card companies and in turn allow them to do as they please, or even rewrite laws to better benefit them (such as the recent reworking of the bankruptcy system).

I have a proposal for the first step that needs to be taken to reign in these leeches. I want all business obligated to separate the extra credit card fees into discrete added costs that are only charged to people using credit cards. It would protect cash paying customers from having to subsidize the credit card costs of others. I'm fully outraged that MY money is going into the pockets of the credit card companies even though I don't use their product (and as such am being penalized for it). Secondly it would make credit card customers aware of the extra fees they're paying without even realizing it.
Such fees are, by the way, the reason that credit card companies are making such a push to get credit cards integrated into everything from purchasing gas to fast food with the RFID tags (radio tags that let you just wave your card close to a reader, it's nowhere near as secure as they pretend it is but this isn't the time to get into that). There's nothing they'd love more than to get people to pay for a $3 fast food snack with credit, they stand to reap millions of dollars from such simple, unnecessary transactions.


There are other things I'd like to see but I'm not holding out for miracles. I want the credit monitoring agencies to be outlawed. They have entirely too much power. If your car is stolen the process is simple. You report it to the police and they try to recover it, and if you have insurance than it can be replaced even if it's not found. And that's it.
If someone steals your identity then you're out of luck. You can be stuck spending thousands of dollars to try to undo the damage. There's no consumer protection. What the credit agencies say goes, presumed guilty, with the considerably heavy burden placed squarely on the shoulders of the individual.


Back to my stolen car example.. Imagine someone steals it and then commits a hit and run, killing somebody and fleeing. The police make almost no attempt to catch the thief, and instead throw you into jail. There's no trial, since it was YOUR car, and you're stuck in jail until you hire a private investigator to track down the person who stole your car.



There are any number of unjust situations like this. As a society we should be interested in making the country a better place to live.


The continuing theme to posts like these is that we COULD make the country a better place if we worked to address things like this. Has all the "greatest country in the world" talk made our society unwilling to consider that anything might not be perfect already? Is that why we're embarked on an obsessive global policing quest which has cost us considerably and benefited nobody?

I can't help but make a parallel to that psychology concept I mentioned earlier, the thing where someone, fearful of some aspect of their own personality, sets out to try to change the rest of the world instead. It's as if we've said that we MUST be perfect, so the rest of the world must be at fault.

Unless the issue has to do with prayer in the schools, or stem cell research, or homosexuality. Then we're only too willing to take action. Protecting consumers from predatory corporations is an unworthy pursuit (unworthy for the politicians who are essentially on the corporate payroll, perhaps), but keeping two people of the same sex from declaring a social union is a top priority.