5 August 2003

Payday Loans and the Sorry State of Modern Education

I was reading an article in the newspaper the other day about up and coming government legislation aimed at the various companies that provide Payday Loans. It seems that the belief is that these companies are charging entirely too much for their services. In addition, some companies are even under suspicion of less than ethical conduct.

The core of the article was comments from various segments of the population which all said pretty much the same thing: How is it that these companies can charge their outrageous fees and interest and be permitted to hold on to their business licenses?

There were other complaints as well. One gentleman in particular, who was not named because he felt that identifying himself would be embarrassing, borrowed one thousand dollars from one company and ended up paying three thousand dollars in interest. He claims that the company he was dealing with took advantage of him because he had an eighth grade education and didn’t know any better. He also feels that the government should get involved in this area of the private sector and act to help people protect themselves from themselves.

A couple of points, here: First of all the Government already has legislation in place to govern how much interest lenders can charge their borrowers. For those companies which have violated these statues, all that is required is sufficient proof and they can be made to see the error of their ways through legal action.

Secondly, I really do no think that it is the governments place to protect us from ourselves. Indeed, there are very few things that the government should be charged with protecting us from, and this is probably a good thing. The less the government involves itself in aspects of our daily lives, the better. Asking the government to step in and guard us from ourselves in situations such as this is the same as giving them an invitation to restrict our freedoms and liberties.

Canada has a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, just the same as the United States has a Bill of Rights, and one of the most important unwritten points of these two documents is that each and every citizen of our great nations has a God Given Right to foul up his life in any way that he sees fit, including being duped by unscrupulous lenders. The only protection from these industries that people should have a right to expect is that which they themselves can provide.

So how are these people to protect themselves, you ask? Simple: Arm yourselves with information. Before you borrow from one of these companies ask them what their requirements are and what their various charges and interest rates are. Then do the math. If the numbers are unpalatable for you, then don’t deal with that company. If enough people start taking this approach then a lot of these companies will soon find themselves out of business through sheer attrition, if nothing else. It’s not like they’re going to hide this information from you. Indeed, they’re legally required to provide it upon request.

But what about those people who aren’t capable of understand the information given to them because they do not have the education? To them I ask, why do you not have the education? Is it because the system failed you or because you failed the system?

The education system in Canada is, by and large, quite good. Leastwise, it was when I was going to school. In the decade or so since my graduation I have seen what I can only identify as a marked decline in the quality of our education. Really, this decline doesn’t surprise me considering how much money has been leeched out of the system over the years in the name of stabilizing our fiscal state. And while the Government is taking money out of the system and forcing the school boards to look at alternate means of funding their programs, the teachers are scrambling for every additional penny they can get their hands on and complaining that they aren’t able to work with what they have. Class sizes are too large, there aren’t enough supplies or materials, the list of complaints goes on and on.

It wasn’t all that long ago that such complaints would have been ignored on the basis that there was no real body to correct or regulate them. And yet, somehow students were still being taught. People learned to read and to write, to do basic mathematics, and to coexist in a world filled with other strange maniacs. But they’re hardly being taught now. Every day I see more and more evidence of this. I see young kids sauntering down the streets and through the malls, speaking to each other and to everything around them in some obscure bastardization of English which bears a striking resemblance to Ebonics and getting honked off when people like me, who actually know how to speak the language, don’t understand them and force them to revert to the tongue they’re supposed to be taught in school.

I hear it every night on the phone when people are placing their pizza orders and ignoring every single convention of common manners. And apparently it is now socially acceptable for your mouth to be fouler than your trousers.

Our kids can’t speak the language properly, and they can’t do basic math. They have no sense of history and can barely read, if they can read at all. And we wonder why unemployment is running rampant. And we wonder why more and more jobs are being taken from us by skilled labor shipped in from overseas. And then, just to top everything off, we have the gall to complain about it, to berate a state of affairs which we ourselves created and perpetuate.

Asking the government to protect us from organizations like Lenders, from which we would be able to protect ourselves if we had a sufficiently basic education, is a lot blaming the gun instead of the person who fired the weapon. But it isn’t going to stop. It’s going to continue and it’s going to get worse and worse with each passing day because as it stands now the system is fundamentally broken and there really isn’t any way to properly fix it.

The refreshing thing about all this is that I can’t really, in all fairness, blame it on Cretin or King Ralph, because the system was declining long before either of them ever came to power.

To those who have been taken to the cleaners by these less than honest folk, you have my sympathies. I’m sorry that your ignorance allowed you to be taken advantage of. However, I would remind you that ignorance can be cured, and that you have the means at your disposal to do just that.

Think about it.