An article just published by Open Democracy entitled “Banking for the many” claims "A new retail bank should be established to provide a full range of retail banking services in every community..".
Well if small bank branches in every village and suburb were profitable, existing banks would already be providing that service. But it's not, so they don't. Ergo the small branches proposed in the above article would need to be subsidised.
Plus given the ever increasing amount of bank business done online, and at ATMs the above proposal sounds to me like a return to the nineteenth century.
I tried to make the latter point in a comment after the article, but was told I’ve been banned from making comments there. Would be nice if they’d told me exactly WHY I’ve been banned, but evidently that’s too much trouble for them. My guess is that Open Democracy is scared of free speech: they don’t like being contradicted.
Yes it is very disappointing when comments get banned because of the ideas they express or because they might be somewhat critical. I can understand not publishing comments that are very rude, or filled with hate, or completely off topic, or maybe even about things that have been addressed over and over on that forum before. But outside of that it is just censorship and reflects very poorly on those who censor.
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