Re: Can Honerable People Have Mortgages?

On Oct 26, 2010, at 10:00 PM, Chris Frandsen wrote:

> On Oct 26, 2010, at 20:39, Dan Minette <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> The second is that the bank who gave them the loan knew that they  
>> didn't
>> qualify for the loan, and had a high probability of eventually  
>> defaulting,
>> but the officers of the bank thought it was in their own best  
>> interest to
>> make the loan anyway.  In that case, don't they have responsibility  
>> when the
>> borrowers follow the law when they no longer are able to make  
>> payments?
>
> Actually,  it seems that in many cases 1st bank packaged this type  
> of loan up and sold it. Now the question is if the mortgagee  
> defaults is the 1st bank morally obligated to pay off the buyer of  
> the loan they sold? Or was it the loan buyers responsibility to know  
> the amount of risk they were taking? I think we all know that  
> corporations do not have moral obligations only legal ones.  
> Corporations are legal constructs. So I guess one could argue that  
> humans have moral obligations but corporations do not. (Somehow, I  
> am must have made an error in reasoning here.
>
> This could be a whole new thread. Maybe we have a new way to define  
> the difference between who is and is not a citizen?

It may be a separate topic, or maybe not. The conflict over "corporate  
personhood" began, at least in the US, with the 1886 case "Santa Clara  
County v. Southern Pacific Railroad" (right here in my home county),  
when the Court Reporter, J. C. Bancroft Davis (a former railroad  
president) inserted a comment in the headnote of the case, recasting  
it as an assertion that corporations are due the same legal rights as  
natural persons under the 14th amendment.

All of this moved from being of interest only to politics junkies and  
liberals like me when the Supreme court decided, in Citizens United v.  
Federal Election Commission, that corporations have the right to buy  
whatever form of government they want to impose on the rest of us,  
which will likely result in more and more egregious misbehavior on the  
part of corporations, eventually driving the pendulum back towards the  
progressive side.

Or so I dream.

Dave