Incidentally, today’s Washington Post aslo says:“Health care will consume 40 percent of the national economy by 2050”. In this case they included the caveat “if current trends continue”, but many newspaper articles don’t even bother with that. They present facts about oil supplies in 2075 or the obesity rate for generations not even born yet as if those were proven facts, rather than predictions. Yet nobody wants to ban newspapers for those statements.
Fraud is when the seller hides information from the buyer with the intention of deception. Fortune-tellers hide nothing. Information about what fortune-tellers claim and how much evidence backs them up is readily available to the public. If a member of the public chooses to ignore that information, that’s none of the government’s business. It’s a situation quite different from the mislabeling of food, in which the buyer has no way to get accurate information.
False advertising occurs all the time. For instance, Bubbas Burgers claims that their burgers are the best you’ll ever taste, which (in my instance at least) was untrue. However, they were not withholding any information from me, so it was not fraud.
#2 will be very difficult in many cases; plenty of fortunetellers are sincere in their belief in their own psychic powers.
But if you can presume #2, why on earth would you allow Amazon to sell books of prophecy or books on astrology? Shouldn’t you ban the sale of such books?
So are you proposing that we ban the sale of any books of astrology that claim they’ll help you find your soul mate, learn more about your personality, etc.? That books on performing magic with minerals should be banned (from sale)? That books purporting to predict the future using Revelations should be banned from sale?
Who, me? I never proposed making selling idiocy to fools illegal in the first place. And blanket bans are dubious on point #2 mentioned previously. But yes, if you were able to demonstrate that a particular book was written by a nonbeliever to make a buck, and that book asserted that the not-believed-in things were true, then I think you could in theory make a case for fraud against the author.
Just keep in mind, that belief in the contents of your book is a defense.
(Yes, I’m aware I seem to be backtracking - but in the prior post point #2 was presumed, and now it isn’t.)
I think there’s a heck of a legal difference between writing a book and selling somebody else’s. At no point do I beleive that Amazon asserts the factuality of any of their books -not even the overtly fictional ones!- so they can’t be nailed for asserting something about them that isn’t true. Uh, unless they lie about the price or something.
I consider fortune-telling a lot like going to the movies. Both of them are active suspensions of disbelief for the purposes of entertainment. Yes, some chuckleheads can take them too seriously, but that’s why they’re chuckleheads.
While generally I would be happier if no-one went to fortune tellers, I think the law is stupid and the wrong way to go about it.
Technically, one can easily claim that someone doing “fortune telling” is really only agreeing to provide a performance for the person, not actually engaging in fortune telling. The correlation between the performance and the future is then left up to the indiviual and their beliefs.
So for instance just about every “fortune teller” that I have seen does not expressly sell fortune telling. What they sell is palm readings, tarot card readings, ect. Obviously the implication in these things is that these readings are in some way connected to future events. But this is not actually stated be the people selling these services. If someone offers to give say a tarot reading for money, and they do actually perform said reading, then they are fulfilling what they promised. If they took the money and did nothing, THAT then becomes fraud.
Secondly, it is also difficult to claim fraud becauses claims of the future, even if entirely made up, still may be true. Indeed some of the skills of professional “fortune tellers” is to make the claims so vague they could apply to anything, and are thus never wrong. They also often excel in “cold reading”, and are thus able to make many true statements, even if the source of them is not magical. Thridly, there is also the problem that given a prediction, people can make it come true, and thus it is not necessarily false. Really, if “fortune tellers” made lots of specific predictions that were routinely false, people would see through them rather quickly and they would be out of business.
Ultimately I can’t see any compelling reason for banning this sort of thing, while allowing other forms of public prognostication like stock reports and the like. The only reason for banning this in particular seems to be ideological (that fortune telling is a priori impossible), and thus is should be allowed under the first amendment.
As suggested above, this would work beautifully. Predict the winning lottery tickets three times in a row, plus the next four hands dealt in a poker game, the color of the next six cars to drive around the corner, and the results of ten rolls of a pair of D10 dice. No licenses ever issued, problem goes away.
This is utter hogwash. It’s easy to claim that practicing various rites is part of your religion, but not setting up shop on a street corner and performing the rites for money for strangers.
As for the book argument, the publication of a book about how to tell fortunes would certainly be protected under the first amendment. The bookseller is basically a common carrier, selling whatever books are available without taking responsibility for their content.
Disclaimer: I own a bookstore. My policy is that I will get any book a customer requests if it’s available through my regular channels, but I reserve the right to pick and choose what gets space on my shelves. I believe that you have the right to write a book about whatever you wish, and the right to read a book about whatever you wish.
However, I believe that if a person is convicted for practicing fraud, that person should be forbidden to write/sell books related to that subject area (e.g., if you’re convicted of fraudulently peddling patent medicines, you shouldn’t be able to just switch over to writing books about patent medicines to continue profiting from your fraud).
Granted, that’s under “editorial reviews”–but if they’re referring to non-in-house editors, I sure can’t tell that from this page. Those claims appear to be claims made by Amazon about the book.
It should be mentioned that these fortunetelling businesses can rake in big money. According to this site the average gypsy fortunetelling operation makes a quarter-million dollars a year. There have been many major victims losing tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to fraudsters.
And before anyone claims that exposing this particular subculture is racist, that’s just what the criminal element wants. Not so different from that Mafia kingpin decades ago who organized an anti-defamation league. And the law in Montgomery County (and in other places from what I’ve heard) does not single out any particular ethnic group.
Sure, we could just dismiss the victims as “chuckleheads”. But part of the purpose of consumer fraud laws is to protect people from the consequences of their stupidity and prevent the unscrupulous from taking advantage of them. Some will always find ways to lose their money in scams. We don’t have to make it easy for the fraud artists by permitting them to openly set up shop.
As to Shodan’s state lottery motto (supposedly “It Could Happen”), my state’s lottery motto is “Odds Are, You’ll Have Fun”. Neither offers the complete picture, but far from a promise that you’ll get rich.