Debt & "Morality"

"Where to start? I could have begun by explaining how these loans had originally been taken out by unelected dictators who placed most of it directly in their Swiss bank accounts, and ask her to contemplate the justice of insisting that the lenders be repaid, not by the dictator, or even by his cronies, but by literally taking food from the mouths of hungry children. Or to think about how many of these poor countries had actually already paid back what they'd borrowed three or four times now, but that through the miracle of compound interest, it still hadn't made a significant dent in the principal. I could also observe that there was a difference between refinancing loans, and demanding that in order to obtain refinancing, countries have to follow some or­ thodox free-market economic policy designed in Washington or Zurich that their citizens had never agreed to and never would, and that it was a bit dishonest to insist that countries adopt democratic constitutions and then also insist that, whoever gets elected, they have no control over their country's policies anyway. Or that the economic policies imposed by the IMF didn't even work. But there was a more basic problem: the very assumption that debts have to be repaid."

Economic colonialism? If we fuck other countries out of their money, resulting in the starvation and deprivation of basic resources for regular citizens who may not even be engaging in politics, preventing them from achieving any sort of upward mobility, status or even basic rights like decent health and clean water, that's like a war on other nations in itself. Other nations who our society then turns around and condemns for being underdeveloped, savage, communist, what have you.

"Actually, the remarkable thing about the statement "one has to pay one's debts" is that even according to standard economic theory, it isn't true. A lender is supposed to accept a certain degree of risk. If all loans, no matter how idiotic, were still retrievable--if there were no bankruptcy laws, for instance--the results would be disastrous. What reason would lenders have not to make a stupid loan?"

Student loans? What would happen if we all just said, we are unemployed or underemployed and can't pay it? MUTINY.

The idea that the whole system of banking wouldn't actually work if they were sure they'd get money back from loans doesn't make sense to me. Can we elaborate on this in class? I understand that there are "smart" loans to invest in and there are "stupid" ones, which the author makes some light reference to, but isn't paying back loans what keeps money flowing in the system? If people didn't pay back their loans, wouldn't that make it so there would be no money to then pay forward to new loans? This relates to the second quote in the opening of the chapter about "owning the bank," which also doesn't make sense to me. I suppose, as I suggested above about the student loans, on a collective level (i.e. if everybody just agreed to not pay back student loans) we would then essentially "own" the capital, being our educations, and what would the government really have the power to do? But on an individual level, being someone who is terrified of debt, I don't get it.

""Surely one has to pay one's debts." The reason it's so powerful is that it's not actually an economic statement: it's a moral statement. After all, isn't paying one's debts what morality is supposed to be all about? Giving people what is due them. Accepting one's responsibilities. Fulfilling one's obligations to others, just as one would expect them to fulfill their obligations to you. What could be a more obvious example of shirking one's responsibili­ ties than reneging on a promise, or refusing to pay a debt?"

This really, really resonated with me. For some reason in our society, people use "morality" as reasoning for completely insane things that make no sense. For example, I can compare this rationale to stealing. Okay, fuck corporations. Slash their tires, prevent their sales, unionize their workers, jack their ingredients...that's what I'd like to see. So, I'm personally against stealing from say, a small family business that's 50 thousand dollars in debt from opening up their...I don't know...bakery, let's say. If an employee steals from them, that's kind of messed up. How much money are those owners really making, once you take away their bills, ingredients, what they pay out for help, etc. But, it's a totally different story if someone steals a few books from a Barnes & Nobles, a multi-million dollar (I'm estimating?) corporation that pays so many people minimum wage to be on their feet all day and pays 30 cents for the printing of a book in another country that they are getting 25 dollars in profit from all the "morally just" consumers who don't even think of just walking out with it as an option because everyone in our country is conditioned to be just like the next person and never critically think. If I steal 100 dollars worth of stuff from a Victoria's Secret and nobody's going to get in trouble or miss that stuff that was made by a 13 year old girl getting 2 pennies to cut her fingers sewing in Burkina Faso, then why the fuck should I be labeled a bad person? Does that make sense?

"The very fact that we don't know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt-above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they "owe them their lives" (a telling phrase) because they haven't been killed."

^This is also the rationale used against rape victims, for getting people to be patriotic (=nationalistic and unquestioning) and join/support the military without thinking, etc.^

Can I just say that I love the transparency of calling the u.s. out on being an empire and making an analogy to it as a gangster forcing other nations into giving it money with a gun?

"Our tendency to overlook this is all the more peculiar when you consider how much of our contemporary moral and religious language originally emerged directly from these very conflicts. Terms like "reck­ oning" or "redemption" are only the most obvious, since they're taken directly from the language of ancient finance. In a larger sense, the same can be said of "guilt," "freedom," "forgiveness," and even "sin." Arguments about who really owes what to whom have played a central role in shaping our basic vocabulary of right and wrong."

I love this, too, because I hate terminology surrounding the concept of "right" and "wrong" and other biblical notions of a moral compass. Everything is relative. I also admire that there is some mention of the correlation between debt and violence.