Your primary moral duty is to repay debt, eh?

Unimportant things like "giving your life meaning" are unimportant.

As a consumer your only duty is to obey they law.

However, moral duty is relevant when it comes to how society should think about debt. Everyone has things they would like to do if they had more money. Society should not be arranged to give people a free pass just because they want to do something that requires money.

> However, moral duty is relevant when it comes to how society should think about debt.

A debt is a contractual obligation and should be treated as such. One should not moralize contractual obligations.

E.g. During the housing crisis, there was a lot of moralizing about homeowners walking away from their underwater mortgages. Moralizing about debt in that way is bullshit. When lenders make a loan secured by collateral, they take the risk of the value of that collateral dropping. There is absolutely nothing immoral about forcing a lender to eat a risk it knowingly on.

Similarly, a corporation would not hesitate for a second, on moral grounds, to restructure its debts through bankruptcy, and neither should individuals. No moralizing needs to enter the equation. There is a penalty for declaring bankruptcy and failing to pay your debts, and that is future lenders being wary of lending you money. There is no need to add a moral dimension to the issue.

What I meant was that when designing rules for bankruptcy etc., but also for how education is funded and other things, society has high level goals which are guided by morality.

My point was that when society considers what it's goals are, it should never be a goal that a person should be able to do things that "give their life meaning" when they can't afford them, because ultimately it is a person's own responsibility how they manage their money.

So my post was aimed at people who thought "isn't it horrible that this woman can't do what she wants in life simply because she can't afford it"

>a corporation would not hesitate for a second, on moral grounds, to restructure its debts through bankruptcy, and neither should individuals.

I see what you're saying, but I really dislike that way of thinking, because it's justifying something bad by saying "That's what others are doing"

That's like saying that because BP are spilling oil into the oceans and getting away with it, you shouldn't stop doing it yourself.

The world would be a better place if morals were used in more decisions, not less.

You're begging the question. Spilling oil into the oceans inherently hurts people and the environment in an uncompensated way. Bankruptcy, meanwhile, is just part of the rules of the game, just as much as enforceable debt obligations are part of the rules of the game. Everyone knows, a priori that repayment obligations can be enforced by recourse to the courts, and everyone also knows, a priori, that those obligations can be discharged by those same courts (what the federal court giveth it can taketh away). Because bankruptcy is part of the rules of the game, it's priced into interest rates. When a bank loans you money, it expects you to default with some probability and charges you a premium for that risk. There is nothing immoral about forcing them to eat the consequence if the risk you compensated them for.

It's not a matter of ignoring morality. It's a matter of not ascribing a moral dimension to something that doesn't inherently have one.

In that vein, Google "efficient breach."

But by your own words, this woman's bankruptcy does hurt other people... the people looking to get a loan later. They are now paying the even higher interest rate due to her bankruptcy being priced in. The more people that default, the higher the probability that the next person will default and the higher the premium the bank charges for that risk.

The rates for subsequent borrowers will only go up if her bankruptcy was unexpected. That is to say, if the bank charged her interest assuming 10 of 100 loans would default, and she is one of those 10, then her bankruptcy does not change the interest rate the bank charges. On the other hand, if the default rate is higher than the bank expected, whose fault is that?

They can only do so much to predict the future based on the past. When they fund loans today based on today's default rate they have no way to know what crisis hits in 3 years to cause a spike in defaulted loans. The system must correct itself with enough padding to cover the smaller fluctuations.

Isn't that also known as "ruthless default"? :)

If people thought this way on a large scale interest rates would probably be moderately higher than they are today. It's not clear to me if that would be an improvement on the status quo.

> Society should not be arranged to give people a free pass just because they want to do something that requires money.

Why not?

I mean, if it works for that society and it's democratically passed, why shouldn't a society do whatever it wants?

Use of the word 'should' makes it sound like there's a moral imperative for us to not help each other. I don't think that's the case, and I think there's a good argument that in future we'll need to consider different types of society that deal with abundance rather than scarcity; for example, with universal living wages.

What I meant was that the amount of wealth redistribution would be a function of your income, not the fact that you really need more money to do a particular thing.

So if I decide it would be really life assuming to quit my job and become an artist, society doesn't have more duty to help me do this than they do to help anyone else on a particular income.

Hey... give your life all the meaning you want... just don't come crying when people start coming around looking to collect all the debt you rack up while doing it.

She could have given as much meaning to her life as she wanted without racking up > 100K in debt. All this does is encourage people to not take responsibility of their own voluntary actions. (And no I am not referring to the children).

In the South, iced tea is not carbonated. :) It is also very sweet, unless you ask for unsweet.

But yes, a Fanta or Sprite could be a coke. A Pepsi could be a coke.

>>It is also very sweet, unless you ask for unsweet.

I noticed that in Wisconsin tea is sweetened or unsweetened; whereas, when I was in Florida the tea was sweet or unsweet.

I also noticed that they make Old Fashions with whiskey rather than brandy. And if you order a brandy sour, it can take the bartender up to 5 minutes to find some Brandy... While attempting to be polite I learned they do not know what gesundheit means either.

I've literally never heard anyone order brandy either by itself or in a drink in a bar in the US.

You might find this interesting: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/case-study-the...

Oh, there is a variant made with Squirt. That reminds me of my Michigan upbringing, drinking lots of Squirt. (Not with brandy, mind you.)

It's not merely an issue of admissibility. It's also a crime to record a call without the other party's consent...

Dude. You claim that "The uninsured rate has actually remained roughly flat at 15%." in response to nhashem's claim that there were fewer uninsured in 1980. But your graph only goes back to 1987!!

Geez.

Nhashem is definitely wrong. It is impossible for 80% of Americans to receive something from their employer if 80% of Americans didn't even have an employer.

My graph does go back to 1987, because that's when the census started collecting data on health insurance. If nhashem has data he is free to post it. It's up to him to prove his claim, not on me to disprove an unsourced assertion.

" It is impossible for 80% of Americans to receive something from their employer if 80% of Americans didn't even have an employer."

Data aside, that is not a logically true claim: in 1980, I had health insurance... through my mother's employer.

Don't forget spouses.

ding ding ding!!! I was just about to chime in about that. Are these stats accounting for spouse and children and adults in school/military at the time? I'd be curious to see how the numbers break down.

Also of note is that when you do calculate in Spouses and children, they still had insurance because it was less common to "only insure yourself" (I have no data to back that statement up).

Nhashem didn't say "through someone else's employer".

If you want to be pedantic about it, understand me as just evaluating your proposition.

But yes, I suppose that on some level you're right: 80% of the population has probably never been simultaneously employed.

>80% of the population has probably never been simultaneously employed.

Nor will that ever be the case.