Ahh, excellent to hear from you I.P. Daley, I'd got that sense but nice to have it affirmed. Given that you largely agree, what's your perspective on my willingness to participate in the process at sub 10% levels? You feel that's also wrong? And you have thoughts on the 10% as the cutoff?
Well, my feelings on the subject of loans and interest rates tend to be best embodied by the Hebrew Tanakh and the B'rit Chadasha, and I think the best way to distill down my feelings on the subject are best encapsulated by Yeshua as related in
Mark 12:28-34, specifically:
The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these.
Let's keep the analysis simple for simplicity sake. Basically, that implies don't charge interest to a neighbor at all, don't charge a higher interest rate on your fellow man who isn't a neighbor than you're willing to pay yourself in their specific situation, and be willing to forgive and release any remaining debt in total if it cannot be paid in full by the beginning of the seventh year (or a limited and finite timeframe)... which as a means tends to set a reasonable cap on realistic loan amount limits in my book if you intend to receive the entirety of the loan back, with or without interest.
If you yourself are comfortable with loans up to 10% in your own portfolio, then I think you're being reasonably just in your approach. Further, your desire to keep rates in the single digits indicates your awareness of the dangers of debt and your unwillingness to inflict that danger upon others. One can say that 10% is a bit arbitrary as a cutoff, but it's well within reasonable rates culturally and historically (excluding the corrupt and cruel empires).
My own personal feelings would put a hard limit on interest rates at around 12-13% as the highest acceptable, and I regard that as steep and bordering on the edge of usury itself, and wouldn't particularly want to personally charge more than half that rate under most circumstances if I were to participate at all (which is a tangentially related topic). Personally, I find all forms of financial debt (with or without interest) as a requirement of servitude to others, and dislike the inherent conflict that being beholden to multiple masters can cause.
It's not to say that if I found myself in a position where doing so might genuinely better another person, I wouldn't invest in their future as such because doing so could help enable their own freedom, but Torah and my conscience would dictate the rules in which that loan was made, I certainly wouldn't do it at all unless I was capable of eating the entire debt myself without one penny returned (though means to securing debt and contractual agreements is a discussion in itself), and it would be done strictly to the guidelines above.
Basically, I wouldn't do it myself as a means to grow wealth... but I also don't begrudge your own practices as they're at least reasonably fair and don't smack of a double standard.
Simonsez, to address your questions:
1) Yes, there is great logical disconnect and fallacious logic by a great deal of members on these forums. In general, subjecting oneself to high interest rates are regarded as anti-mustachian and grounds for face punches... until the person in question is the lender, then it's regarded as a high yield "investment". Hypocrisy is hypocrisy.
2) What does that mean? Again, it's a matter of hypocrisy. It's not that I'd be okay with seeing my fellow man participate in usurious lending practices against others, and I'd still denounce it... but if someone is actively undergoing the very financial practices presented in their own life by taking out loans at equal rates to what they're lending under similarly appropriate circumstances? Then I would consider the person foolish, but I could at least
respect them for not being a hypocrite.
It's not about imposing my own values on others here, it's a matter of holding others accountable to their own stated values.
People can try to justify and defend the practice all they want citing that "nobody's holding a gun to their head" or "enabling others to dig out" or "if it's legal it's okay" because their rates are lower than credit card rates but still unconscionably high... but they can't escape the fact that
they know better than to ever hold debt at those rates. That makes them guilty of actively exploiting another person for their gain.
If you want to cite the example of genuinely helping someone shovel out? You can do so at rates that you would be willing to pay yourself.