Because the regulation of the law declared the shit he was doing to be illegal (mail fraud, larceny).
Wow, you did a lot of digging for a very insignificant point. You do realize that a government can be wildly irresponsible without also being completely controlling, right?
In any event, the kinds of responses I’m getting in this thread are my own fault. I should know better than to make a post with a generalized complaint. It’s like opening a new barn, asking people to fill it, and then wondering how it got so full of straw.
This answer makes no sense.
Just because there’s a law on the book doesn’t mean it magically catches crooks.
For example, every state as a “law on the books” requiring consumers to pay sales tax on even on out-of-state purchases. That law doesn’t stop the millions of consumers ignoring it, now does it? Using your statement at face value, we should have millions of amazon.com shoppers in handcuffs at this very moment for tax evasion!
No, what caught Mr. Ponzi was somebody using their brain and high school mathematics to conclude that his investments were a scam.
If there was no regulation against it, him being “caught” wouldn’t matter. He could just take his ill-gotten gains and skip town.
I think you’ve lost track of what originated my first reply.
spazattak comment gave the impression that Big Government regulations prevent people from “getting screwed ala bernie madoff.”
I’m saying regulations don’t (and can’t) really prevent scams. Regulations are good for setting guidelines of punishments after the fact. However, they’re not good for detecting scammers.
Agreed, yet I’d add that they also offer victims some recourse, which is at least as important as punishing the perpetrators of scams.
No, see, there were regulations in place. And he was eventually caught. But without regulations, there’s nothing to catch anyone doing. Nothing would be illegal.
So your example doesn’t work. Doesn’t matter who first got a whiff of wrongdoing, without regulations there would be nothing wrong with anything. Does it matter that Watergate was first brought to our attention by a newspaper?
Gotta have some regulations, or there’s no way to say that anyone is doing anything wrong.
As I replied to Algorithm, what you’re talking about is not the scenario of regulations “protecting us” as put forth by spazattak. That’s what I was replying to.