Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason the Shaggy defense doesn't work is the default assumption of the courts is that you're a deadbeat trying to game the system. This assumption comes about because in the majority of cases it is the truth. The system would be a lot nicer if there weren't people trying to scam it every hour of every day of the week.
> a deadbeat trying to game the system. The problem with putting a value judgement on this is that it will precondition people to assume good faith or bad faith on the validity of the assessment based on how they interpret the fairness of the court system. Instead, we could just say that the majority of the cases are people trying to get out of legitimate debts. If we wanted to go farther, we could say that's because…
There's another discussion which could be had about just how legitimate even "legitimate debts" actually are in some cases but that's even more in the woods.