The yearning of many for someone else to take care of their onerous financial problems is one of the reasons scammers flourish.   Scammers told their clients, “Don’t worry babes–just give us the money, stop talking to your lenders, stop calling your banks and creditors, we will do everything for you.  We will lift your burdens off your poor shoulders.  Just send us money every month–we’ll pay your debts off.  Tighten your belts and give us the dough!” 

Repeatedly the Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition advocates said that the consumers were unwitting victims.  Doesn’t make any sense to me.  I loathe the scammers and I believe they need to rot in prison long and hard.  But the consumers baffle me.  They come from a mentality of fiscal listlessness.  Here we see smart, good people who believed some stranger, by virtue of his TV ad or his glossy brochure, could actually be a better advocate and middle man for them than they themselves.  They lacked the confidence to storm the banks, they imagined that the very financial institutions and credit card companies from which they had borrowed were impregnable fortresses that needed specialist intervention for solutions. 

We are a nation of middle men.  There are too many of them–useless bureaucratic bean counters.  We rely on them to do our jobs for us.  The brokers, the financial services consultants, the lawyers, the mortgage lenders, in the field of medicine the insurance agents–I call folks in all these jobs parasitic–they parasitize an unregulated or weakly regulated system–a system with little oversight. 

Why should these guys tell us the truth?  They live on commissions and live off omissions.  While some of them may be ethical, most have no incentive to be truthful.  The more customers they rope in, the more their commissions.  They promise the moon and the sun, they disseminate false research and convince customers all things financial are attainable.  It is a numbers game and the perpetrators are not necessarily consummate fraudsters, but they are dabblers in the scamming art and they cut their teeth on gullible customers, perfecting themselves along the way. 

We create them, foster them, feed them and we finally slay them when they metamorphose to dragons.  Then we blah, blah about trust, faith and other human traits that don’t apply to the twenty first century, when social nets have gone frayed and each man is forced to fend for himself.  The scammers are greedy–the consumers are needy–an incendiary combo. 

3 years in prison for defrauding a woman out of her life’s savings.  My God!  Is the federal govt sane?  I don’t trust our govt. anymore to promulgate and maintain a civil society.  Uncle Sam is a decrepit, corrupt, profligate and clueless master–too big to fail?  No–too big and failed.