So in the current EU/US political climate, MtGox would be bailed out, meaning people who didn't invest their money with MtGox would be forced to make the people who did whole. Whereas in the current BitCoin climate, the investors suffer and will be forced to sue MtGox to reclaim their money.
Which is morally better?
No libertarian will tell you that either of these is a preferred outcome, but out of the two, the morally superior one should be relatively obvious.
Edit: The reason I say it would be bailed out is not because they are investment accounts but precisely because it was so huge in the BitCoin economy.
MtGox is an exchange, not a bank. I'm mentioning this because there is an important third person with a bank: the customer, not the investor.
With mtgox, every customer is an investor. When bailing out a bank, however, the rationale is often to help out the people who cannot be blamed: the customers.
I'm still not claiming that bailing out I banks is a good thing, but the comparison you make is a small apples/oranges thing.
This sounds a lot like the too big to fail argument and so it is not an apples/oranges thing. It's a sliding scale and the only reason it seems like it is apples and oranges to you is precisely because MtGox isn't big enough.
I'm not saying that customers of a bank should suffer for the investment side but let the investors suffer for their bad investments, if the political will is there.
> the morally superior one should be relatively obvious.
Except that it isn't. Hence why many smart people disagree on the issue.
The difference is meta-ethical. The TBTF argument is fundamentally a utilitarian one - it's saying, "This is distasteful, but we're going to do it anyway because we believe it will result in a better final outcome." The Libertarian take on the issue frames it in a fundamentally deontological light, as you have. It's concerned with the actions themselves, and doesn't even attempt to speculate on long-term practical consequences of any particular choice of action because they aren't relevant to the argument under that particular framing.
Which is fine, both are legitimate approaches to ethics. What bothers me is when the two camps start just talking past each other. Which is what seems to be happening when one makes a statement such as "the morally superior one should be relatively obvious" in this context. In terms of persuasiveness, it's reminiscent of the Verizon "Which one is bigger?" ad campaign - there's an attempt to get at something legitimate there, but it's overshadowed by a rhetorical approach that could make even the best argument in the world feel unpersuasive.
Which is morally better?
No libertarian will tell you that either of these is a preferred outcome, but out of the two, the morally superior one should be relatively obvious.
Edit: The reason I say it would be bailed out is not because they are investment accounts but precisely because it was so huge in the BitCoin economy.