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No trickle...
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this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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What kind of debt? Is it immoral to owe someone a favour? Or is it immoral for someone to owe you a favour?
Is it only immoral if there's interest? If someone lends someone $500 to cover rent, that's immoral? Is it more or less immoral to watch someone lose their housing when you could have helped?
All immoral. You can give someone $500, they might give you back $500, maybe even more
But you can't have the expectations of repayment. That's where it goes off the rails
Owing someone a favour is immoral? That's a weird world you live in.
That's the thing... Owing someone is the problem
Helping is great. Counting favors is bad. Help, repay help, pay it forward... All great. Expect repayment? Now we're back at the problem
It's funny how people keep litigating debt into more and more nebulous forms, but I'm just more and more convinced I'm correct. Debt is wrong, it's evil. We should actively prevent it, in our thinking, in our language, in our laws
You all are just too debt brained to understand, no one should be allowed to sell their future. From every angle, it just plays out worse than just not doing it
"Debt brained"? Dude, "debt" has existed as long as humanity has existed. You're the one who's "debt brained" for thinking it's a bad thing. That's just society.
In a society people do favours for each-other and what makes it a society is that the person who had a favour done for them acknowledges that as a member of that society, they should try to pay the favour back at some point, otherwise they just seem like a drain on that society. That doesn't mean that you can't also have gifts, it just means that sometimes aid isn't given as a form of gift, it's given with an expectation that at some future point the giftee will become the gifter.
That's just totally incorrect. Most people throughout history didn't even use money, let alone debt. Taxes were paid in grain, livestock, and essentially community service
Debt created money, but money is not as old as humanity. It's not required, it's not coded into our genes
And counting favors is widely accepted to be shitty behavior. It's transactional, it's low trust
You can just do favors, and call the guy who never helps out a lazy asshole. They're unreliable so people eventually don't want to help them, and we have all sorts of fairy tales about it
You need to read "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber. Debt goes back a lot longer than money, and has been part of human existence for as long as that existence has been recorded.
There is no human civilization without debt.
I said that, money was created from debt, of course debt came first
What about the Incas? I'm sure there's others, but we know a lot about them and their economic system, and they only fell because of outside interference
You also said:
So, why not just admit you're not well informed on this subject and leave it there?
Ok, now you're just splitting hairs. But I will concede the word debt means more than what I'm using it for
But there's a difference between "I did this for you, and it's expected you'll reciprocate later" and a formalized version of this
I don't know how to put it into words yet, but the merchant of Venice is about the idea I'm circling around. Reciprocity is one thing, selling the future, which is always uncertain, is another
One of these things is the fabric of community, the other is evil
You're the one splitting hairs. I made sure you meant all forms of debt several times, and now you're trying to redefine what you mean by debt now that you've been shown to be wrong.