Quote:
Originally Posted by ResAlien
The same reason voter ID laws are garbage. Not everyone has the means to fight a lawsuit. You can argue the merits of debt and debt repayment until you're blue in the face but at the end of the day not everyone can hire a lawyer and take time off work to go deal with legal issues. Not everyone is part of the Alberta 1% club.
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I thought I had addressed this? Let's leave aside the existence of free legal clinics that deal in stuff exactly like this every day. You don't need a lawyer. If you show up to court, and the other side fails to prove its case - for example, by not having the loan documents handy, or other convincing evidence that you owe what they say you owe - you don't even have to say a word. The case is getting thrown out. Now, if you want to say that there should be a mechanism in place for you to be better compensated for the waste of your time or even a penalty for going to trial with lawsuits that have no reasonable prospect of success, I'm open to those ideas. But this does not justify ignoring lawsuits. It should be pretty obvious that that is a terrible idea.
Moreover, even if you were right, from a principled standpoint, this only applies in cases where the person in question doesn't actually owe the money. The bookkeeping may not be good, and debt purchasers may just be buying a spreadsheet, but that's just bad records practice on their part. There are obviously exceptions, but most of the lines in that spreadsheet weren't pulled out of thin air. Those are bad records, but underlying those bad records are actual receivables on actual debt that people actually borrowed.
If you go to court to defend a lawsuit over a debt you actually owe, and win, it's
you who gamed the system. You borrowed money and didn't pay it back. If you don't, if you ignore the lawsuit (for still no good reason I can see), and the creditor gets a default judgment against you... well, you borrowed money and didn't pay it back. That's what lawsuits are
for.
Quote:
Originally Posted by calumniate
I still fail to see what was truly misleading about the piece though. It did have an obvious slant but thought the point of it was more to say how far most americans are in debt and default on loans, and the structure and processes that exist in recovering the debt?
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My interpretation of the point of the piece was "the debt resale industry is inherently sleazy and corrupt, profiting off the backs of innocent people using underhanded shady tactics. Basically, they're a bunch of goat pimps."
Quote:
Originally Posted by V
You write pages and pages about completely irrelevant semantics, but now with this, something interesting, you're just going to stop? C'mon man!
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Despite my protestations, as Resalien said, I haven't really stopped... but obviously we have different ideas about what is "irrelevant". Also, what the definition of "semantics" is; but I'll just stick with the OED on that one.