It seems to me the author of this piece chose selfishness. I have to agree with the Slate response. This op ed is irresponsible, and I cannot believe the man is writing a book about money.
This man has the same attitude as young people who take payday loans, then never pay them back. If the person taking a debt doesn't pay it, others will have to pay that debt for them in one way or another. The extreme case being the devaluation of the currency or the economy as a whole. Money isn't free, if it were we could just print more all the time and solve problems that way. That this man's stance is somehow intellectual or philosophical compared to youths taking payday loans is class-ism.
Your views on what money is, how it is created and how loans work are outdated by a at least several decades. Nobody is paying for the loans you default on and 97% of all money is created when commercial banks grant loans. A 2015 study offered solid evidence that individual banks indeed create money "out of thin air". I have linked that study several times, this thread included. Money and loans are not what you think they are.
Fair enough, but I still don't understand why the fact that the money 'created' by the loan relationship (as the BoE put it) isn't erased by the payment and end of the loan relationship isn't relevant. That is, there's new money in circulation, and nothing happens to take it back out? Isn't that inflation in action?
Because it wasn't people lending him that money.
Could you at least bother finding out how the current monetary system works before articulating strong opinions? Because as it is, all you're doing is demonstrating deeply ingrained cultural programming. This is beginning to get tiresome. If nobody can be bothered to actually read the evidence, complete with documentation, that one offers because it looks too much like an academic paper (which it is), then I really don't know how we're going to have a serious and honest discussion that's nor just a reiterration of those same old talking points. "PAY YOUR DEBT OR YOU SHALL BE DISHONORED, PEON!" is a mentality which serves nobody but the guys living off that tasty compound interest. You know, the same people who'll happily pay themselves a nice big bonus after just having been bailed out by the general public. Have a look at this link. Those numbers are peer reviewed. See the total outstanding amount? Yes, that's 1.54 trillion $. And here you guys are, getting worked up about how a guy defaulted on his student loans. Do I think that guy acted responsibly or that he has any right to compare himself to today's struggling students? Not at all.
Are all of you getting worked up about minor issues while the elephant in the room has just grabbed grandma and is about to stomp the couch? Absolutely.
No need for sarcasm, Gumbo. I'll just leave this here. It's a PDF. Just jump to the conclusion if you don't want to read it all, you can still go over the whole thing if you want. Once you're done, why not have a look at what The Bank of England itself has to say about the matter. When you're done, why don't you tell me if SOMEONE OWNED the money prior to giving it to him. You're welcome.Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the
borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money. [...] In reality, neither are reserves a binding constraint on lending, nor does the central bank fix the amount of reserves that are
available. As with the relationship between deposits and loans, the relationship between reserves and loans typically operates in the reverse way to that described in some economics textbooks.