Making Off

There's a central point which seems to be absent from the discussion of Madoff, who, recall,
seems to have admitted to his sons that he's been running a multi-billion dollar fraud, a classic
Ponzi scheme.

Reflecting on how his victims were taken, I noticed the obvious pattern, and compared it with a
related fact that Salt Lake City is the nation's capital for fraud. What's the connection?

It's been my experience, both personal and observed, that most religious people are religious
because of a desire to be a better person. To the degree that they're motivated by that desire,
that's commendable, to the degree that they succeed in their intent, it's even more commendable,
and to the degree that they are not too badly exploited because of it, so much the better. But
there's the rub.

It is a very small step from "I am religious because I want to be a better person than I am" to
" I am a better person than I was because I'm religious" to "I am a better person than you are
because I'm religious". Of course it's not generically religious, it's "Mormons are better people"
or "Jewish people are better people" or "Christians are better people", or "Islamic people are
better people". Indeed in the English language, "christian" is used to label an uncommonly
altruistic person. And that's where the fleecing gets bad.

Salt Lake is the scam capital of the US, because Mormons believe that Mormons are better people
and so can be trusted for that reason alone. It's neither surprising nor coincidental that
Madoff's victims were disproportionately Jewish, for the same reason.

My own personal beliefs go a step further, that religion is a scam, and so religious people are
a self-selected group of people more likely to fall for a scam. If this is true, it's likely to
be a fact known to scam artists, who may well target those communities for easy picking.