You must have a way of paying the debt back, or you wouldn't have been able to obtain the resource you did on a promise.
The people doing the deal with you accepted your promise to repay. They don't do that for the fun of it.
Debt is just a way of spending things without selling them first. You can either borrow against your car to spend it, or you can sell the car to spend it.
Either way if you consume rather than buying another car, then you end up with no car.
The financial crash would like to have a word with you.
Many people gave 'resources' to people who couldn't afford the debt, because with many layers of obfuscation, and perverse incentives for mortgage providers, they made it look like many more people could afford it than actually could.
Further...payday loans...loan sharks...people get money for things they can't afford, and can't realistically pay back, all the time.
It sounds like you are saying, "Don't worry, if we can't manage to pay back the loans we have taken against the planet's nonrenewable or slowly-renewing resources, we can just declare bankruptcy and start over", which is not as reassuring as you seem to imagine.
Bankruptcy works on a small scale, as an act of grace, because the bankrupt party can bootstrap themselves back into productivity using the functional economy around them.
When too many people go bankrupt at once, the economy crashes.
When the whole planet runs out of ecological credit, and we all go bankrupt at once, where are we going to find another civilization to bootstrap from?
All the easy energy is gone, forever. There will never be another coal- or oil-driven industrial revolution on planet Earth. If we reach bankruptcy on the scale of a planetary ecosystem, it will most likely be permanent, as far as Homo sapiens is concerned.
Whether bankruptcy is necessary to capitalism is irrelevant to your point
> You must have a way of paying the debt back, or you wouldn't have been able to obtain the resource you did on a promise.
I am stating that some people _don't_ have a way of paying the debt back, and yet they have been loaned to, incurring debt, and thus ruined (as the parent you were originally replying to suggests)
> You must have a way of paying the debt back, or you wouldn't have been able to obtain the resource you did on a promise
This simply isn't true. On small scales, people lose their businesses and families declare bankruptcy. That's why I said this isn't a hypothetical. And on a large scale it causes financial collapses if many people go bankrupt at once.
It simply is true. But under capitalism plans don't always work out. That's how it is supposed to work. Things are tried and some fail. That way is progress and productivity.
We have system autostabilisers that rebalance the ship when the private sector has a blow up.
Bankruptcy is the reset mechanism. It's a mechanism that actually works, unlike the debtors' prisons we had previously.
The people doing the deal with you accepted your promise to repay. They don't do that for the fun of it.
Debt is just a way of spending things without selling them first. You can either borrow against your car to spend it, or you can sell the car to spend it.
Either way if you consume rather than buying another car, then you end up with no car.