I think there's a middle ground between "unrestricted predatory lending" and short term lending. The payday loan industry spends a lot of money on lobbying to push things to the former end (see attached article about 1000% interest rates), and have been very successful [1]. (But the overall lack of a social safety net in the US is due to moneyed interests that go well beyond the payday loan industry.)
Yours is a typical HN binary take that holds a thing must be an utterly unalloyed good or it must be banned, there's no middle ground for a thing to be useful when moderated and regulated, and predatory in other circumstances. This is a very common intellectual failure mode.
Yours is a typical HN binary take that holds a thing must be an utterly unalloyed good or it must be banned, there's no middle ground for a thing to be useful when moderated and regulated, and predatory in other circumstances. This is a very common intellectual failure mode.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/us/politics/payday-lender...