doesn’t absolve personal responsibility for looking into it
Right there, is the heart of the matter: I don’t care whether it’s a home loan, a car loan, a business loan, fixed, variable, prime, subprime, or laying down plastic for a plate of prime rib; when one enters into a credit contract, the primary ethical contract made per occasion, is with oneself. There is one question one must answer truthfully, or the transaction is a dishonest one:
can I pay for this as I am agreeing to?
All the experts and scholars and economists and statisticians and pundits and moral-relativists in the world can dance around and obfuscate and speculate and theorize all they want, and it’s all hyperbolic bullshit. Either one agrees in good faith, first with oneself, to make agreed-upon payment, or at some point one is simply being dishonest.
Incentivizing people who have no ability to repay, and know they don’t, to borrow anyway, just as you say above, doesn’t mean they aren’t still obligated to their own consciences (if they have one) to question their own ability, and intent, to repay as agreed.
I got sent one of those “pre-approved” credit cards a couple of years ago, right at a time when things were pretty unstable for me and a little extra spending ability came in right handy. With my catastrophic history with borrowing from lenders, I knew what might and probably would happen, which is what has happened: I ran the thing up, ended up paying (am still paying) more in fees and interest than the things was ever worth in principal. And more than once I have had that argument with myself: it was their fault, they never should have sent me the thing, their rates are too high anyway, they already made too much money off of me, screw those nasty banks anyway…. etc, etc…
And almost talked myself into defaulting and ignoring all the collection notices until they finally stopped coming. They will give up eventually, I know that. I could get away with it. But I decided to stick it out, pay it off one fine day, and call it lesson learned, a fifteen-hundred dollar one in trade for having some portion of five hundred available when things get tight. Silly, ill-considered, expensive, foolish, good-money-after-bad; yes, it has been all those things. But I made the decision, I agreed to terms, and if I don’t see it through I just wouldn’t feel quite right about it.
Because that stupid and very costly piece of plastic was MY doing, not anyone else’s. That is the reasoning that I just haven’t seen much of in this whole imbroglio over Who Caused the Meltdown.
We did.
