Hacker News Reader

Comment by tylersmith | Hacker News Reader

It's not coercion since it's well within your rights to not borrow money or buy financial products if you don't like the terms. Neither of the things you mentioned are life requirements. If you want them because you think you'd enjoy them then you need to agree to the other parties' stipulations, and if not you can continue to live without them. The fact that people have offered these products to the market doesn't mean you are entitled to have them under your own terms.

View on HN

The terms benefit the coercive institutions more than the end user. They protect the institutions while reducing their accountability to zero. Credit monitoring companies are mafia like rackets and your blind support of them is extremely concerning.

The institutions give you cheap loans in exchange. This has opportunity costs. Giving you cheap loans is not free for these institutions. They could be investing their money elsewhere instead. They would do so if it wasn’t for the fact that having this information about you reduces the risk just enough that they prefer giving you the cheap loans to investing their money elsewhere. People who are offered these terms are offered a fair deal that is a win for both parties and that they are offered a fair deal is exactly the reason they accept it.

Yes, terms authored by an entity are often more beneficial to that entity. That doesn't make them "coercive". Don't do business with them and you'll be fine. Credit monitoring companies are nothing like the mafia. They won't come break your legs if you don't play ball with them.

Of course you're concerned. People that can't or won't manage to be responsible for themselves are always concerned that others don't agree with them. It threatens to hamper that carefree way of life.

This is a disingenuous stance to take. You could hardly be employed, pay rent, buy food, and live a modern life in any sort of comfortable way with this perspective.

Live a modern life, comfortable by modern standards? You’re right about that. But people in the past lived in worse conditions that were considered modern and comfortable then and credit ratings, by making the market for loans more efficient than it was before (however bad it may still be, it’s better than what it replaced), contributed to the improvements. You want to have your cake and eat it too, and it would be nice if that was possible but it is not because nobody is going to give you cheap loans if it comes with too much risk.

> You want to have your cake and eat it too, and it would be nice if that was possible but it is not because nobody is going to give you cheap loans if it comes with too much risk.

OP is not saying that he doesn't want anyone performing credit checks. He's saying that he wants to be able to choose a company that values privacy. Currently, there's no option of choice for the consumer, and that's a problem.

If the bank loses too many customers because a competing bank is offering to use a better credit checking company, you can bet that they are gonna change.

Most people don't care enough, and only select on price. So the bank gets the cheapest option for nonvisible backends (like credit checks)

Lots of countries in Europe have nothing remotely resembling the US credit scoring system and people there obviously live comfortable, modern lives and have access to financial services.

So far, I have had a credit check done once. It was done by me voluntarily, to unlock additional functionality (receiving the purchase before the payment gets cleared), with my explicit consent ("checking your credit involves transmitting the following data to xyz") and had a link to a form I could use to request the data they had on me from the credit rating agency (via post). Very different experience from what it sounds like people in the US have.

Okay, so then don't "live a modern life in any sort of comfortable way". That's not some sort of requirement or need. You're free to not be employed and gather your own food if you don't want to come to agreements with other people.

What's disingenuous is trying to pass off "modern life" as some sort of necessity and pretending like you couldn't exist without demanding use of other peoples' works.

Not in the US. You can go off and try to start a hobby farm in state/national forests or a hidden corner of someone's 10,000 acre ranch, and you might even get away with it for a while, but you're not free to do it.

Correct, you're not allowed to trespass on other peoples' properties. If you want to farm or live off the land you need to first have value, then make money, then buy land. It's a pretty straightforward process. It does not require sending data to Equifax, so I'm not sure what your point is.

That's how it works in Economics for Kindergartners 101 or a world with about 100x fewer humans, yes.

Where's my 40 acres and a mule?

Only If you've never needed to borrow money or hold credit.

Nobody needs to do those things, they choose to do them.

Yes, absolutely. Credit reporting is a pillar of contemporary standards of living.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com