The Serfdom of Revolving Debt

I work in retail in order to pay my bills. It's not my first choice of vocation (I am presently working to get into my preferred choice of work: academia). Invariably every Monday and Tuesday my coworkers and I in the Big Blue Box (IKEA) will put away unopened and unused merchandise returned to our store after the customers purchased these items during their frenzied shopping on Saturday and Sunday. They will return these items for different reasons: the color didn't go with their existing decor, it didn't Glade well, the eight foot wardrobe couldn't fit into the back of the Honda Civic, whatever. I posit the true reason behind a sizable portion of these ill-conceived purchases returning to us come from the fact that some people simply could not afford to make a large furniture purchase on a whim. The economic situation that many of us find ourselves in does not warrant us to make snap decisions about large purchases that take up, in some cases, an entire pay period's wages. Those who do make the purchases are able to do so by stretching out the cost of their acquisition over time, paying around ten to twenty percent interest to a third party in the process.

In my lifetime, our country has transformed itself into a healthy creditor nation to one that parasitically thrives on debt. It has reached a point where society, i.e. the banking sector, deems it essential for all people to have a line of revolving debt in order to appear salient when we make larger purchases: automobiles, mortgages, and large durable goods such as appliances and other home improvement things (air conditioners, water heaters, et cetera). It was not too long ago that in order to establish a good credit rating, all someone had to do was make a purchase for a large item like a car or refrigerator and pay for it over a limited amount of time (plus a flat fee for doing so) along with maintaining regular payments on utilities such as power, waste disposal, and water treatment. If you did so (and it wasn't difficult if you had a secured job in a manufacturing plant) you kept the item you "purchased". If not, the repo men came and snatched the refrigerator, sofa, or car from your residence. If you stopped making regular payments on your utilities, they shut off your power or water. All you needed to maintain a good credit rating was regular payments on secured loans: loans for actual items and services that can be repossessed or disconnected if you defaulted. Presently, you cannot get a decent credit rating if you do not have unsecured revolving debt, the type you get with a credit card issued from a financial institution.

Those people old enough to remember should remember that everyday working people whose only asset was their house (that only had equity since they most likely were still paying a mortgage on their home) could not get credit cards - charge plates they once were called - simply because they had nothing to back up paper loans offered by banking institutions. Also, the only real credit cards at the time were American Express and Diner's Club, two companies that did not originally offer revolving debt as an option until recently. Now, banking institutions will grab anyone they can, regardless of their income, and make them customers, college students for example. Our society has accepted the fact that we need unsecured revolving debt in order to establish that people quickly eliminate their home's equity in order to pay off their credit card debt, only to resort to using their MasterCard and Visa to pay for groceries and fast food. When our society has devolved to the point where we have to borrow to survive, it makes us serfs to the banking industry vassal lords: forever tied to the land known as revolving debt.