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In a followup to an article discussed previously here on SoylentNews:
Bloomberg has a three-part series on the use of an obscure legal document that unscrupulous lenders are using against small businesses.
- In Part 1 - I Hereby Confess Judgement, (the part discussed earlier on SoylentNews,) they go into detail on what the predatory lenders are doing to small businesses using a document known as a "Confession of Judgement" to extract court wins from small businesses without a trial.
- In Part 2 - The $1.7 Million Man, they go into how a debt collector became NYC's top earning official.
- In Part 3 - Rubber Stamp Justice, the article describes how the courts are involved, and what some of them are doing to prevent this abuse.
After the story was released on Bloomberg, the New York State Attorney General's office opened a formal investigation last month.
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Predatory Lending is Crushing Small Businesses (continued)
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Slowly and surely the unix crept up on the Nintendo user ...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:56PM (6 children)
The flaw is simple, obvious, and therefore almost always missed: the assumption that "business" and "government" are two quantitatively different things, and never, ever, in any way, ever overlap.
Once one realizes that this is part of the libertarian bedrock, myriad examples throughout history--from guild systems up to the current pay for play morass in the US--rear their heads, and collapse this delusional paradigm from the inside out. Powerful enough businesses are essentially government entities, and government that gets involved with money beyond a certain point is business.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday December 04 2018, @10:17PM (4 children)
That's certainly one of the flaws, yes.
There are so many others it's hard to know where to start really.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:09AM (3 children)
Can we point out the one thing that Libertarianism is absolutely right about? The concept that unless, and until, you infringe upon the rights of some other person, no one has the right to tell you how to live your own life. That is, once you reach the age of majority, you don't have to answer to any church, any non-profit, any social movement, any self-appointed authority, the media, the insurance industry, or anyone else who comes along, telling you what you _should_be_doing_.
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday December 05 2018, @05:06AM (2 children)
The problem is when is someone infringing on the rights of someone else and what exactly are those rights. There's a spectrum from physically assaulting someone for no reason that most everyone agrees is wrong to things like burning oil and releasing CO2 that may affect everyone.
In libertarian land, putting lead in gasoline and paint was fine until at some point there was enough evidence that it was infringing on peoples right not to have lead poisoning. At what point was there enough evidence?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 05 2018, @02:44PM (1 child)
So - uhhhhh - lemme get this right. Lead was introduced into paint and gasoline by Libertarians? That was back when Libertarians ruled congress, right? And, the Senate. And the White House.
Wanna know what I think? I think it was mostly Republicans and Democrats reaping the profits off that lead. I'm quite sure a few Libertarians were in on it, but for each libertarian, there were about 40 Dems, and about 40 Reps, and maybe 6 or 7 indies and/or 3rd party.
I also kinda think that Libertarians are misunderstood by a lot of people. Maybe that's why they can't win 2% of the electoral vote.
(Score: 3, Touché) by dry on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:21PM
No, when lead was introduced into paint etc, things were how Libertarians want things, government staying out of peoples and companies business. it's an example of how things would be in libertarian land.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:39PM
In my opinion, a well run government has a lot in common with a well run business, and that, too, makes them harder to separate.
In the (not so distant) past, government had license to do things like take your children and send them off to die, which made simple transgressions of occupational safety in business look not so bad. The world has changed a lot in the last 30-50 years, and deeper entwinement of government and business seems to be one of those changes for the worse.
Perhaps when the next revolution comes, we can enshrine separation of government and business the way we attempted and only mostly failed to separate church and state last time.
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