"Our Model is the Trapezoid."

In the thread about the Madoff scam a couple days ago, Weiner noted this classic analysis of various scams from Teresa Nielsen Hayden. As it happens, spending my college years in Montreal with medicore French and an unemployment rate ~15% caused me to spend some days in jobs specalizing in #2 — summer in a boiler room selling sports memorabilia, two hellishly miserable days selling Kirby vaccum cleaners (Me: “Why aren’t we stopping in [relatively affluent Montreal suburb?” Driver of van: “These people didn’t get rich paying 2 grand for vacuum cleaners. Hmm, I guess that truism might no longer be true…) And because my friends shared the same economic climate, I also had friends make me sit through Amway pitches and actually spend three months working for Kirby, often pulling in 6 14-hour days a week and getting paid bupkis. So I’ve always been interested in this stuff.

Anyway, I think I’ve identified a group of victims I have no sympathy for: crank libertarian tax deadbeats who pay other crackpots to produce farcical legal justifications for their tax evasion. They can just think of getting thrown in the slammer as “Going John Galt.”