My understanding is that your income and work contracts are inspected, and that banks can see your other loans / lines of credit.
The rule of thumb is that your loans payment must not be above 1/3 of your income.
To check your income the bank will ask you for a tax document and pay stubs.
People buy house and cars, and the country did not start the sub primes crises in 2008.
Seems to work well enough.
There's also a government-managed register of bad payers (called "interdit bancaire" - literally "forbidden from banking") for which there's a lengthy process to get onto that may involve court action - the lenders literally have to take you to court.
This means there is a due process to get onto the register, and a simple misunderstanding or fraudulent company can't ruin your credit (unless they want to lie to a government official and potentially to a court).
There's a strong distrust of government across the entire political spectrum. The difference is that one half thinks the solution is to let private corporations handle everything because they have this strange delusion that a corporation actually has their interests in mind beyond the bare minimum to earn a profit. The other half has a delusion that government can be fixed.
I struggle with this one. If they don’t know how to do X, find people that do and hire them as civil servant, with a slightly less than average salary.
I know it’s not that trivial, but I don’t see why conceptually it cannot be fixed?
( asking as a new us citizen btw; I voted for the first time a few month back. Yes, this place is fucked. I will probably not retire here. Or even stay that long.
But there is a few things going for us. For instance direct democracy is more alive than most. Electing judges, specifically in that debatable precedent system… is really powerful and readily accessible.)
Sometimes these combine. Like, if the state wants to build a new road, they'll give the contract to whoever is going to donate the most to the governor's campaign during the next election, even if that means it costs a lot more.
It doesn't help that our voting system creates a scenario that will always devolve into just two political parties. Any third party candidate ends up being a spoiler for a similar party and guarantees a victory for the other major party. This is why Democrats are hoping Trump runs for President as a third party, as it would split the Republican vote and hand the Democrats an effortless win.
We only have direct democracy for local and state offices. Presidential elections are not a direct democracy.
The first one should be harshly reign in IMO. Having strict and enforced limitation on donations works. The proof : crooked politician try to get around it and are sometime getting caught. ( sarkozy, chirac )
Second one is more mechanical: having > 2 parties allow politics to happen.