"But can anyone convince me that credit card companies produce wealth by charging exorbitant interests to people who use the money to buy beer and chips?"<p>How using my credit card to buy beer and chips produces wealth:<p>1) My rewards program immediately reduces the price by 1%.<p>2) If the chips are moldy and the vendor won't let me return them, I can cancel the payment.<p>3) I pay no interest. The credit card bill is paid in full every month.
<i>Yet the average credit card debt per household is over $15,000 in the USA (and it grows all the time, of course). Does anyone believe that these $15,000 are invested in highly profitable ventures?</i><p>Who is the author to ignore the values and priorities of the rest of the public? It seems that he wants everyone to live by his own standards.<p>If the people borrowing this money believe that they're getting greater value than they are costing themselves, then they are in fact making themselves better off.<p>The author doesn't see that they're better off, either because he doesn't understand their values, or he's simply not looking at them as individual people but a monolothic heap of people. But either way, he's ignoring the evidence of their own actions.