Lately, I have been lamenting “scams as business models,” and what I’m about to say is pretty close, I acknowledge. Many of the scams that irritate me arrive as emails, and some are more subtle and pernicious. If I had to identify something specific that bothers me, it’s this: when I was a child, I was taught (misled, perhaps) that a sale was a buyer and a seller arriving at a mutually acceptable price. Indeed, that’s the fundamental premise of economics — price discovery. Yet, very often, the seller misrepresents the good/service s/he’s selling,
I think I’m a pretty accepting guy: I’m not like a tattler, and I’m not going to try to tell someone else what to do. That said, I can acknowledge that if people decide en masse that “fuck you, pay me” is good business, we’ve got serious problems.
We’re basically at the point where I simply don’t believe claims made in sales anymore. And that can’t be good for the economy: if buyers don’t trust sellers, they’re not going to buy as much, which will contribute to a reduced GDP, which will reduce tax revenue, and etc.
And set aside the _extremely deleterious_ economic effects, the paradigm we seem to be living in the US accompanies low morale as well. After all, this sort of economy — a scam economy — signals to people that honesty has no economic value and can thus be discounted. When that is done at scale, we wind up awash in scams and unpleasant people. It’s like the worst of both worlds. And why? Because we have a market economy that has decided we should have a caste system, too? Uhhh…. No. Let’s not. The American economic system has _so_ many rules. Like, you can’t sell heroin — or farm opium! You can’t simply open a bank without a federal charter. Airlines, trains, automobiles, consumer goods, and even the land have rules related to how they all can be used. This notion that extreme wealth disparity was decided by a free market and is ultimately good for society is plainly stupid. And, like, I will spare you the quotations from the bible that essentially make the same point, because I know that some ppl have even reinterpreted the bible to make money good.🤦♂️