I think that the number of “criminals” in America is quite small. By criminals I mean those who have committed serious crimes. That would include the 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in federal and state prisons and in local jails. Add to that the people who already committed a criminal act and have been through the criminal justice system, and throw in those who might commit a criminal act if they thought that they could get away with it. Maybe that’s twice as many, another 5 million people. All in all that’s about 2.5 percent of the U.S. population.
Does that mean that 97.5 percent of people are honest?
Our society today seems to define honesty across a large spectrum — many people would take home pencils from the office, but most wouldn’t think of stealing a car. Maybe they pay their income taxes — well, all except for undocumented cash transactions. You can see that there is a lot of turf between extremes.
Here’s how I see morality: By the time you are a teenager, you know that there is a difference between right and wrong. It makes little difference whether your moral system is dictated by the legal system, religious heritage, some code of conduct like the Boy Scout Oath, or moral lessons your parents teach you. I think honesty is measured by what you would do even if no one could ever find out what you’ve done. Or put another way, as some wise person once said, “If you won’t tell the family at the dinner table what you did last Saturday night, you shouldn’t have done what you did last Saturday night.”
You may not always do the right thing, but with a good sense of morality, at least you know when you are transgressing. What worries me is that we seem to have created a culture in which too many people don’t even think like that any more. They look at life as a “system” and they think that they can “game the system” with impunity.
There are people who by virtue of job loss or extraordinary health expenses have debt that has become a burden. There is a huge difference between those folks and someone who just doesn’t want to pay his bills.
Buying something at a sale for 50 percent off from a merchant who has a reason for selling at that price is still an honorable contract. Buying something at full price and then trying to get your credit card company to settle for 50 cents on the dollar may be identical from a mathematical standpoint, but the latter is dishonorable.
Nonetheless, there has been a lot of press lately about credit card companies settling for 50 cents on the dollar that almost promotes it as a good scheme. The credit card companies may have good reason for offering deals like this to some people, but that doesn’t make it honorable to take their offer if you can afford to pay. It isn’t honorable and your credit score will reflect that.
My belief is that bad debts – let’s call them what they are – are sand in the gears of progress. We know that any business has to have an allowance for uncollectible accounts. The more risk they take, the higher the reserves, and they charge higher interest rate or fees to account for the added risk. Knowing that a business has to write off a certain percentage of accounts does not make it okay for you to be one of the ones they write off.
We have had flakes in all cultures since the dawn of time. When we all lived in small towns, however, people couldn’t get away with this for long because everyone knew everyone else.
It’s different in our large anonymous culture where we usually deal with strangers. It creates a false impression that just because you can’t see the company whose bill you don’t pay, it somehow isn’t dishonorable or your action hasn’t created pain somewhere else in the economy.
That’s all the more reason for you to become educated, smart, and to be one of those stand-up people who act honestly and honorably all the time.
Randy Johnson – Author of How to Save Thousands of Dollars on your Home Mortgage and Savvy Borrower articles, Randy is a mortgage broker who has financed over $1 billion in properties. He writes about home buying and real estate finance topics for CreditBloggers.com.
Randy Johnson Randy is a Credit.com contributor and seasoned mortgage expert. He writes about home buying, mortgage laws and real estate finance issues. He has financed over $1 billion in properties, is the author of How to Save Thousands of Dollars on your Home Mortgage and he is a feature columnist for Savvy Borrower.
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