> My experience is that credit cards are predatory and offer an easy alternative to basic fiscal responsibility: Living within your means (more humbly than you might want), knowing what expenses you should expect and planning for them.

There's a wrinkle here: basic fiscal responsibility currently exists at odds with the reality most people need to exist within to be content.

30 years ago, a middle-aged person in the United States could generally (though not always) count upon financial progress, and this mirrored most of American history. Financial progress is a synonym for societal progress in many ways.

That's no longer the case. A middle-aged person today is less likely to own property, have adequate savings, be debt-free, etc. than their parents were.

Credit has become a way to numb the fact that more and more of the money never trickles down. The fact that it's available and so widely used points to a society that's looking for that easy alternative, but not to basic fiscal responsibility; instead, one to basic access to the value created by labor.