Tag: Marks

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Whenever I think of Donald Trump, I remember that Americans actually admire swindlers. How do you explain vacation time shares? Or must try diets? Or Alex Jones vitamins? Amway? Telephone Sales? Trump University? Swindlers, grifters and telesales people, whatever you want to call them prevade the American landscape.

The problem for Americans is the victims of the grifter. They are an annoying lot. Whining about being taken advantage of when they simply should have just been smarter. Or more suspicious. Or more assertive. Or something better than they were in order to stop themselves from being taken advantage of. Americans may pretend to take a dim view of the grifter but really they are more upset with the mark.

Think about a story where someone takes advantage of someone. Invariably you will hear: how could someone be so stupid as to fall for a story like that. The grifter is just doing what grifters do but the victim, now there is where the trouble is. They let their guard down. How could they do something so stupid?

There is an admiration for the grifter for coming up with such an ingenious grift. But the mark. There is no sympathy for the mark.

Think of the society we have created. We tolerate grifter behavior, even say it is the grifter’s right to grift. They can phone us, email us, text us and even, if they are old fashioned enough, knock on our doors. If you don’t want what they are selling, all you have to do is say no. Some of us are so good as to be actually polite to these assholes trying to sell us things we don’t need or want.

The poor grifter is just trying to earn a living. Yeah, right, off of the gullible. More troubling is that grifting is a rich person’s crime. Time shares. Crypto coins. Life Insurance and any number of suspicious business practices are initiated by the rich to take even more money from the poor and the gullible.

This is where our real estate developer president comes in. He is a known grifter. He was convicted of being a grifter in regards to Trump university. He provided his students with a college degree that was meaningless. He also has a history of stiffing trades people right at the point when a non-payment becomes a misdemeanor instead of a felony. Misdemeanors are handled in small claims courts and are rarely worth the money you have to spend to get the money owed. Ka-ching. This practice by the rich has become so pervasive that trade’s people are now marking their prices up in order to recoup what they are rightfully owed. The lesson here is you have to grift in order to deal with grifters.

Since Trump is know to be such a talented grifter, people might think that here is the man to deal with our corrupt system. Yes he is grifter but, then, so is everyone else. Who better to handle the other grifters than a fellow grifter. The problem, as with all marks, is that people have a tendency to think that they can spot the grift and will save themselves from the grifter. That, is, of course, what all marks think.

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When hearing stories about swindlers and marks, Americans have a peculiar tendency to be angry at the mark instead of the swindler. The mark is almost as guilty as the swindler for being so gullible. If there weren’t so many dumb marks, swindlers would all be out of business.

This odd belief has created a rather interesting way of looking at business transactions. The basic assumption in business is that the other guy is somehow trying to screw you and you need to be extremely vigilant in order to avoid being taken. People expect salesman to overpromise, overcharge, and avoid talking about problems with the product. Since swindling is a part of the salesperson job description, people aren’t much bothered when they learn that the salesperson they are dealing with is a swindler.

Swindling is part of the American DNA. Swindlers began arriving on these shores pretty much the start. I remember Sister Mira telling the story of the Dutch buying Manhattan from the Indians. It amused her to no end how stupid the Indians were when they sold the island for $24. How could they sell such prime real estate for such a low price? Couldn’t they see that New York would soon become one of the most important cities in the world? The Dutch, on the other hand, were smart businesspeople. Doing what businesspeople do screwing over people to get a better price. The Dutch were smart, the Indians weren’t. There was no shame in underpaying the Indians.

Of course, Manhattan was not the great city it became when the Dutch settled, so the $24 might have been a fair price at the time. That, however, isn’t the story the Sister Mira was telling. She was telling a story about how the Dutch outsmarted the Indians and it was perfectly acceptable business practices to do so. Yes, children, at a Catholic school no less, learning that it is perfectly all right to screw people over in a business transaction. Being fair is not a part of capitalism. If the Indians wanted a fair price it was their responsibility to bone up on Manhattan land values and not for the Dutch to offer a fair price. Deception is just a part of business.

When I moved to California, I learned that my car would not meet California pollution standards. It was an older car. I decided it would be easier to buy a new one in California and sell my old car in Kansas rather than driving an old car half way across the country and upgrading. Since I never sold a car before, I asked for advice from a guy who I knew had experience in buying and selling car. He immediately offered to buy my car, giving me the impression, that, oh shucks, I know you are in hurry to leave, I don’t need the damn thing but let me just take this off your hands so you can leave without worrying about selling your car. I took him up on the deal. Once the title and the check changed hands, he couldn’t wait to tell me how he just screwed me over. The car was worth at least a thousand dollars more than he paid.

I should have known, right? Absolutely I should have known that was why I asked him in the first place. I wasn’t trying to sell him the car, I was trying to learn how. Instead of telling me how, he, knowing I didn’t know what I was doing, offered to buy the car. Then, after the sale, he gives me the lesson that I wanted in the first place. He took advantage of me and felt absolutely no guilt about it. To add salt to the wound, nobody felt the least bit sorry for me. I should have known better.

These stories litter the American Business history. Antique dealers going to garage sales and finding a treasure. They buy the treasure for a song and then earn a fortune on the resell. The antique dealer is admired for his business savvy while the seller is a chump. If the seller doesn’t know what he has that is his own damn fault. The seller got the price he was asking for. There are no moral qualms about it that is just the way Capitalism operates.

Getting a fair price is different from getting a good price. One is laying all your cards on the table and the other is just deceiving someone. Shamelessly deceiving at that. This is particularly annoying when many pro-Capitalist apologists try to argue that Capitalism is the only moral system. I am uncertain what lesson Sister Mira was trying to impart to her class. What I learned, though, was that you don’t have to be fair when working in business. Do whatever you need to do to get the deal done. Be the swindler and not the mark. How this jibes with making me a good Catholic, which I mistakenly believed was Sister Mira’s primary responsibility, is beyond me.