> its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.
As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400. The bailiff took a motorbike (or scooter) that could easily have covered the debt. It was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt. It was so unfair it should have been criminal.
The difference between bonobos and chimps are genetics and not culture, you can't train chimps to live like bonobos and vice versa.
Us humans still has the genes that made us conquer and enslave the whole world, every single human culture that has ever existed enslave and murder animals, as we needed to do that to survive. You ain't gonna change those genes, so we just have to do the best we can with the genes we have and our genes are like Chimpanzees in that we want to murder and eat and exploit others, without that humans didn't get b12 and died out, so all our ancestors lived that way.
Farming is an invention, the majority of human history was spent without farming of any kind, something like 80% of human history was in the hunter/gatherer phase.
We should not underestimate the fact that where we excel is that we are better at passing off information to our offspring. This makes improvement over long periods possible as we can build off the backs of our ancestors.
Speaking with conservatively minded friends on this subject, they just shrug it off, smug in the knowledge that if they were in that situation they would immediately be able to pull themselves out of it. The fact that other people don't just do that is because they make poor decisions and therefore its all about 'personal responsibility'. There really is no convincing them otherwise.
I was talking to a conservative chap the other day during the SNAP crisis and he was foaming at the mouth that SNAP needed to be abolished. I asked him what to do about the people with disabilities who couldn't work. He told me he knew personally of two people born without arms or legs who have factory jobs earning $45/hour and have no need of SNAP and therefore anyone disabled who was claiming SNAP was a scammer. And if they really are that disabled, he went on, then their family should be taking care of them and not the state.
p.s. this person has also never paid taxes in his entire life because "government is a scam"
I don't think you've even thought about this for 30 seconds.
> If it could easily fetch more money, it would have been bid higher than £50.
Have you ever been to one of these auctions? I haven't. If I want a used vehicle, I go to a trusted dealership. Few people attend auctions, hence demand is low, hence prices are low. When there's no incentive to sell something for what it's worth, the seller will put in less effort and sell it below market price.
> Then did the debtor not sell the motorbike to pay the debt?
They probably needed it. You try doing food deliveries without a vehicle. Now their job's gone.
> it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.
Well obviously. Being poor is excruciating; nobody would choose to be poor. The ones who are capable of helping themselves do—in fact, they help themselves when they're broke, and they never become truly poor in the first place (per the article's definitions).
The point is that, before the bike was collected and put up for auction, the debtor could have sold the bike to pay the debts. Then, once the bike was put up for auction, buyers could have bid on it if it was really worth more.
Multiple people in this story had a financial incentive to profit from the bike, yet no one did. The only evidence we have of the bike's value is OP's claim. Does it not seem more likely that OP is simply wrong about the bike's value?
Oh hohoho but that would imply that the auction is inefficient and so surely rational actors would descend upon these auctions thereby converging this discount onto the true fair value of things.
Heaven forbid we admit that markets are not comprised of spherical chickens and that disconnects exist...
Again, the debtor could have sold the bike themselves and they didn't. Bidders could have recognized the bike's value but they didn't. This is a story about OP overvaluing a bike and nothing else.
I get your point but there are more factors at play here that you might not be aware of.
The debt in question was council tax, every household in the UK pays this at a monthly rate, something like £140 a month. But what most people don't know is that these monthly payments are technically a "gesture of goodwill" from the council, and if you are late for a payment they will really quickly take it to court and send bailiffs for the full yearly amount so you're looking at £1500 plus court fees plus bailiff fees for attending immediately. Easily £2000 from missing £150.
Next another little known fact - if you don't let the bailiffs in, they can't take anything. They can come back with the police if you let them in once. However they can levy on things that are outside, like a vehicle.
So that's what happened here, and once they levy on the vehicle you are not legally allowed to sell it if you sign the levy.
So the debtor in all likelihood ended up in this situation very quickly and could not sell the motorbike himself once the bailiff visited. As for the over valuation, I give you that but only in a very specific scenario - for the market where they sold it.
Now as for why they sold it so cheap, why would they care? They only care about their fees. It they can visit three times by only pretending to knock on the door and charge three times, they will. When it came to this motorbike, they got paid the fees for selling it, the auctioneer got their fee, and nobody involved had motivation to market it. We're not talking ebay or well marketed property auctions here.
In fact, the bailiff now gets to go back to tell them the debt isn't cleared and charge them for this visit as well.
That sounds absolutely draconian and horrible. But the issue doesn’t seem to be the debt collection. Rather, the issue seems to be a total lack of due process.
If you don't have a vehicle you can't do anything, if this person was anywhere other than a large east coast city losing your vehicle is death. Have you ever tried to go somewhere in the south without a car? Pick two points even a couple miles away from each other around Kansas City, Kansas and genuinely think about how you would physically do it. You can't go anywhere so you can't work so you can't pay rent, you can't do anything. What is even the point of not going to prison except the fact you would have to stay in jail for a few months and you might be literally devoured by bedbugs?
OP's central claim was that the bike should have been able to cover the debt, but, due to systemic malice on the bailiff's part, the bike only covered small fraction of the debt. My point is that OP is simply over-valuing the bike. If you change OP's story to: the bailiff got a decent price for the bike and took a small fee for the service, it becomes a lot less outrageous.
> [The bike] was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt.
If this claim is true, then I think most people will still find this conduct outrageous: How is it in the public interest for the baliff to take actions that harm both the debtor (by taking the personally valuable bike) and the public (by wasting from $15 to $50 of the public's money) to the benefit of only the baliff ($35) and auctioneer ($15)?
Those fees don’t seem unreasonably high to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bailiff was operating at a loss given the time it takes to take possession and bring the goods to auction.
It’s in the public’s interest to have mechanisms to quickly process insolvency in a way that attempts to fairly value property. Auctions solve that. If debtors don’t like the outcome, then they should sell the good themselves before it comes to that. Having others sell your property for you is always going to incur an additional cost.
The point is that, regardless of whether the bailiff’s and auctioneer’s fees are eminently reasonable, it will always result in net-negative benefit to society (excepting the bailiff and auctioneer) whenever the bailiff confiscates property whose auction proceeds are less than the sum of those fees. It is therefore contrary to the public interest for the bailiff to confiscate property unless it can reasonably be expected to substantially clear those fees when auctioned.
1. The debtor probably need the motorbike, badly. He probably should have sold it to cover the debt but didn't think of that as an option. Not the smartest choice but again, he's there probably because of another set of similar choices.
2. The parent seems from the UK and I am not sure how things work there. But many auctions are "closed off" in shady ways. In one of the countries I (and some friends) have contemplated going, gangs with knives were putting people off. The gov. employees involved knew about it and do nothing.
> Whenever "the poor" are debated, it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.
3. Many of the times, they are not exactly bad or lazy people but they might not have made the optimal choices. They should, probably, be penalized for it; but not by completely wrecking their life and sodomizing them for a good many years. Also back to 2, and the parent you are replying to, many times the system is designed to over-screw them in the process.
As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400. The bailiff took a motorbike (or scooter) that could easily have covered the debt. It was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt. It was so unfair it should have been criminal.