It’s interesting to see the variety of opinions here on repaying debts.
Some people think that borrowing money from other people must be followed by earnest best efforts to repay the debt. At the other extreme, some people think that repaying borrowed money is something that should be avoided without consequence by using any available loopholes in the legal contract.
I think what the legalistic types are missing is that ethics come before the law. The law is just our primitive best efforts to make rules out of our a fundamental drive for ethical social treatment of ourselves and others. The law is crude and often wrong. Driving our behavior from the law when it conflicts with ethics leads to a less civilized world.
But, in the case of this mortgage madness in the USA of 2009, I’d say that 2/3 of the population, and the majority of Congress and our financial and other political leaders, have embraced what is essentially theft – the taking from others for personal enrichment. This is accomplished by borrowing with no intent of repaying, or greasing the skids that make such a process normal. In such circumstances, I think the few people who stick to ethical behavior are being taken to the cleaners, and will not be recompensed.
One person in a hundred acting ethically/altruistically cannot offset 99 people acting unethically/selfishly. Hell, one person in two acting ethically cannot offset the damage done by the other person acting legally but unethically. For society to function, you need 99 people acting ethically for every one person acting unethically. Consider the typical borrower in So Cal who didn’t intend to repay their home loan (unless someone else gave them the money to repay it). The typical loss they walk away from is probably around $200,000. To make the losses passed on to the rest of us tolerable, let’s say $2,000 on average, you’d literally need 99 people bearing the burden fro every person walking away from theirs. There were too many people involved who borrowed way more than they planned to pay back out of their net pay for that ratio to work.
