Banks are shady as all hell, and are almost always involved in the government's direct interference in the economy. Take a look at this series by Extra History on the evolution of currency. Every time a problem needs to be solved, it's either something caused by the government (war is pretty expensive), or a problem that could have and probably would have been solved years before by the private market if it weren't for the government. Banks are pretty much always major players when this happens.
I think it's safe to say that in an absolutely free market, things would be way more fair for low-income people. Exploitation isn't nearly as noticeable when A) trillions of dollars aren't being siphoned out of everyone's income to be wasted on whatever insane plans your local politician came up with, and B) entire international economies aren't being systematically fucked with for political (usually war related) gains.
Here's a video that goes in depth on why banking in America, and the West in general, is so fucked up. Again, a lot of the problems talked about in this video could have been avoided without the existence of the state.
Banks are shady as all hell
Hence why I still use a tiny credit union in a state I do not live in that only has a few branches and actually gives me several % interest on my checking account, so I put everything I can through them to help support them.
I completely agree with the whole "paper is worth nothing", banks are awful, government puts their greedy nubs into everything and wastes our generated currency by accumulating debt and giving away our nation's wealth, devaluation our currency, etc.
A true free market in theory can fix many issues, but in a true free market with a small government, who's responsibility is it to ensure that something like the Moors invasion of the Iberian Peninsula would not happen? Is that the government's fault for not being large enough to support a strong enough defensive? Should the local militias have the training and equipment necessary to defend against hordes of invaders? Should the free market always have a strong initiative to subsidize defense?
That's where it really breaks down for me. If our world was peaceful, AnCap would be great. But it isn't.
who's responsibility is it to ensure that something like the Moors invasion of the Iberian Peninsula would not happen?
That's one of the biggest problems that would have to be faced when putting an Ancap society into practice, and I don't have an answer for how it would be prevented in our world today, which is exactly why there are no Ancap enclaves. They would have to face not only getting invaded from every direction, but harsh sanctions from every country that doesn't want their authority challenged.
The first step to getting past this problem is to spread Ancap principles as much as democratic principles have been since the enlightenment. There are two ways of going about this: the first one is convincing people through discussion (and memes), and the second one is to establish a defacto-ancap society, and avoid the invasion/sanctions problem I mentioned earlier. The best we've come up with is literally colonizing the ocean, which we call seasteading, but technologically, that's far from being possible. When/if it is though, the hope is that international treaties will prevent existing nations from attempting to invade or tax the seasteaders, and a crackdown won't happen until the world really starts to notice that there are people living just fine without a government, just like how the American Revolution proved to the people of France/Europe that Democracy is just as workable as monarchy.
When he brought up the payday loan thing, it made me think back to when I found out how many of my friends did not have a bank account, or could not even open a bank account. That fits into this discussion nicely, because you now have people who get paid less for the same work because they don't have a free direct deposit/check cashing service. Just another way for people to be exploited I guess.