Fraud

“You can’t cheat an honest man,” P.T. Barnum is reputed to have said. Whether this is true or not, no one can be cheated without their complicity, and a very large percentage of people are cheated because they believe they are going to get something for nothing. Anyone who is cheated willingly participates in the con or fraud and is at least partially at fault.

Fraud is not force. There is no force involved in fraud; there is deception, deceit, and the lie; there is gullibility; stupidity; and the desire for something for nothing; but no one is compelled to be defrauded. Anyone can walk away from any transaction that smells fishy. “Buyer beware,” and, “if a deal sounds too good to be true, it is,” are the common sense expressions of the basic principle that will protect decent people from being defrauded, “you get what you pay for, and everything of value costs something.”

Though force is not fraud, it is lumped to together with force as something people have a right to use force to protect themselves against, and, therefore, something people have a right to allocate to the government. But force, used by either an individual or a government against a con artist is the initiation of force.

Fraud, is essentially a lie, and nothing more. When a fraud is successful it is because someone believes the lie and acts on it. The perpetrator of the fraud is not the one who causes the loosing transaction to occur, it is the victim. In most cases of fraud, if anyone is going to be punished, it ought to be the victim for being so stupid.

As for the perpetrator of fraud, the cheat or con artist, what should be done about them? Well, what are they, after all. Could you live with yourself if you knew your livelihood depended on people who were stupider than you and that you lived, not by producing or providing something of value, but by getting from your inferiors what they produced. If you could, what you are is more punishment than anyone ought to have to bear. Both the con man and his victim are at fault, and both suffer the consequences of fraud, but no one else does.

Blackmail is similar to fraud, except the victim is usually even more at fault. Bribery, another “crime” which people feel perfectly comfortable using force to deal with, is also a crime that involves no force. It is difficult to see exactly how bribery could possibly be a crime except for the fact that government outlaws it. In a free society, paying someone for doing what you want is the only moral way encourage people to behave the way you want them to; every other way involves threats or force and is evil. This is one more way government turns good into evil.

The biggest con game going is the one that guarantees to protect people from fraud. The second biggest is the one that guarantees to protect people from crime. When these cons are successful, the gang that pulls it off is called the government.

Of course government is a con game, and it is the biggest because it is nothing more than the professional wholesale version of what in the amateur retail version we call crime, the thing it supposedly exists to protect us from. All of a governments laws and functions have one purpose, to keeps it victims asking for more and mercilessly crushing all amateur competitors.

The success of government depends entirely on the degree and length of time it can continue to defraud its victims, which are called citizens. A government can produce nothing and can do nothing, except to harm or threaten. All that a government is given credit for providing is confiscated or coerced from others.

If the behavior of government seems inexplicable, it is because you probably continue to believe government exists to provide a beneficial service to its citizens and that this is the chief aim of those who run it. The purpose of government is its own promotion and the chief aim of those in control of it is to remain in control. Does that makes its behavior a little clearer?

Government is the great fraud. The most successful politicians are those who have no allusions about the true nature of government and operate accordingly, that is, as consummate con artists.

The most successful politicians in a democratically elected government are those who are able to convince the most people that electing them will ensure the government will give them what they want. Candidates that are intelligent enough to know this and carry it off are intelligent enough to know the government can never give those who elect them what they want.

When the government does not give people what they want, it is the politicians who are able to convince people it was the other politician’s fault, while he, at least, is working for them, who will continue to be elected. There is not bigger fraud than this.