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A lot of the resistance I’ve gotten for saying that people ought to pay their debts comes from people angrily declaring that after all, the banks are vicious predators. In some cases this is true . . . certainly, in the case of Tom Vellucci, which I debated with Felix Salmon last week, the servicer seems to have offered him an unsustainable modification in the hopes of squeezing the last drop of savings from a dying man.
But I don’t think this is an adequate argument. Steve Waldmann, for example, seems to view walking away from your mortgage as a sort of game theory move, a just retribution in our society-wide game of tit-for-tat with banks that aren’t behaving like good people. I sense that he is not alone.
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