Is Bankruptcy Immoral?

Posted On: 2006-02-08Length: 18:47

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Hey everybody, and welcome back to your Debt Podcast. My name is Jay Fleischman, and today is Wednesday, the 8th of February, 2006. Thank you so much for staying subscribed and for tuning into the show. If you've got any questions or comments, please do drop me an email at debtpodcast@gmail.com. For those of you who log onto the website all the time to check to see if there is a new show, rather than subscribing, what you can do is you can enter your email address on the sidebar at the show notes page, at debtpodcast.com and we'll send you an email every time there's a new show. Could not get any easier. It's free. It's easy. It's fantastic.

So today what I'd like to talk to you about is whether bankruptcy is considered moral or immoral. I get a lot of people who come to me and who believe that bankruptcy is bad not for any of the standard reasons that people think about, but because they think that it is against religion, and that the Bible, they say, is anti-bankruptcy. There are a lot of people, personal finance people, who you may hear on the radio, or on TV or on other podcasts who say that bankruptcy is bad. People who come to you with a religious bent claiming that the bankruptcy is a bad idea. And that just isn't so. The Bible makes it clear that people are generally expected to pay their debts. Leviticus says that, in fact, it says that no one will or should advance any argument against this general proposition. However, this moral and legal obligation to pay just debts must be balanced by such considerations as the need for compassion and the call to cancel debts at periodic intervals. The biblical basis for such considerations is based on the sabbatical and jubilee years. The secular basis arises out of the constitutional...