[MrRubix]

It's not really conceptual -- it's liability. It's money that will need to be paid back out.

We can't just forgive/eat the debt all-around. It's like saying that I borrowed $1000 from you and then suddenly decided that I couldn't pay it back. You wind up eating a $1000 loss and that has some pretty serious consequences. Money is equivalent to real goods in our market -- and so to forgive money is also to forgive promised goods, which to many is not negotiable (say if they require drugs/medications/housing/food/etc).

It's like the subprime mortgage crisis -- people were given loans they couldn't technically afford, and so when house prices went the other direction, insurance needed to be paid out, but no capital had been set aside to do it, resulting in a massive hole in the economy. You have to do *something* with this hole -- usually in the fundamental way of borrowing from someone else to afford the payment. This is why our global economy would have basically collapsed to nothing had AIG not been bailed out. People don't realize how close we were to that collapse happening, lol.

The problem occurs, naturally, when you start running out of places to borrow. The holes get bigger and bigger, and the holes are ultimately caused by incredibly inefficient wastes of resources.

But you can't say that everyone in the world should just forgive and forget all debts, because people are still eating massive costs. We're in the situation we're in now because of financial irresponsibility -- and it's everyone's fault, both banks and citizens alike (ultimately, though, we *can* place more blame on the banks because, well, they know better... or so we'd hope). It's harder to blame a stupid person for making a stupid decision than it is to blame a smart person for making a stupid decision.