TV Tuesdays 4: Two things I loathe about the US government

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Welcome to the fourth installment of TV Tuesdays!

Sister and I just got access to our parents’ subscription to Paramount Plus to watch the Yellowstone prequel. Sister is as reflexive about people pleasing as I am about complaining, so I often get my way even on things I don’t care much about. I’m an incredibly slutty TV watcher. I’ll at least start to watch pretty much anything that’s not Fox News. And even that, I might try a new show. But then, I’m gonna let you know what I thought about it.

I got through 2/3 to 3/4 of the first episode of Yellowstone, complaining the whole time about the politics of the show. White people doing nativism. Landowners feeling smug. I got more than enough of that in San Francisco.

I was more than willing to watch the prequel, but sis suggested The Good Fight, which looked much less likely to provoke my complaining. And I do love it. I’m about 3/4 through the first episode and cannot wait to watch more.

AND YET I still found something to complain about.

In the show a bunch of people get fucked over in a Madoff-type Ponzi scheme.

Sister asked me to remind her what a Ponzi scheme is. I briefly explained that it’s when a bunch of people “invest” in something where there’s nothing of value except to get more people to invest. I told her it’s a great way to make money as long as you get out before it crumbles.

Then in the show, a character reveals that if you made any money from a Ponzi scheme the government can freeze your assets to potentially redistribute the funds to people who lost more or ended up with less.

This made me really mad. Hopefully this is just Hollywood stakes-raising. And I not have the energy to look into whether the government really does this.

But it reminded me of the actual Madoff scandal. Multiple people told the SEC Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. But the SEC refused to investigate. I’m sure Madoff’s family connections to SEC investigators had absolutely nothing to do with it and it was indeed just a “lack of resources.”

TV Tuesdays is supposed to be a light and funny diversion, and yet I’m still me and so here we are. I’m using a TV show as a jumping off point to complain about two things I absolutely despise about the US government.

They are the government’s tendencies to:

1. Punish private citizens for failing to be cops

2. Defer to the precautionary principle

Stop making us pigs

A lot of government policies are aimed at trying to force private citizens and businesses to essentially do law enforcement’s job. Money laundering and Know Your Customer laws are aimed at getting financial institutions to investigate and rat on their customers. Operation Choke Point and similar efforts pressure businesses to discriminate against totally legal but “disfavored” categories of business, including gambling, porn, and firearms. Freezing assets obtained through a Ponzi scheme you merely participated in seems aimed at punishing for you for not doing the SEC’s job for them.

Throw precaution to the wind

There are several categories of opportunities regular people are legally prohibited from investing in. I remember one of my friends went through tons of work to get a particular license to invest in a particular type of thing, and then found that it’s still practically impossible for him to invest in that thing due to regulations.

I get that the government would want to protect low-information investors from losing their shirts. This is the precautionary principle in action. Let’s stop all potential harms without considering the possible tradeoffs.

The tradeoff is that the US has rates of lower economic mobility than similar countries and over the past four decades or so our economic mobility rates have been on the decline. (Economic mobility refers to the percentage of people who move from rich to poor or the other way around over the course of their lives.) We’ve got this meritocratic, classless, everyone-can-make it myth. But the reality is that in the US, the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. The US government is codifying economic immobility by legally locking poorer people out of opportunities to build wealth.

Failing to investigate and stop actual scams while denying poorer people investment opportunities ends up creating the worst of both worlds. The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, and Ponzi schemes end up happening anyway.

Anyway, I know that’s a bit of a bummer for a TV Tuesday but it’s my newsletter and I’ll rant if I wanna.

Header images come from me putting the headline or some body copy when the headline violates the TOS into OpenAI’s DALL-E. Today’s prompt was “impressionist painting of bernie madoff.”

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