I forgot to link TNH’s wonderful post on the Taxonomy of Fraud from her weblog Making Light. Why do we see frauds?
These scams take the forms they do because they’re parodies–no, a better way to put it: they’re cargo-cult effigies–of the deals the ruling class cut for themselves. If you’re an insider, if you have the secret, you can have a job where you make heaps of money for very little work. You can avoid paying your taxes. You can inherit a pile of money because an ancestor of yours left a moderate fortune that’s been appreciating ever since. You can be your own boss. You can have other people working for you, who have other people working for them, who all pay you a percentage of the take.
