By Todd Hayen - August 9, 2025

Remember the primary way people used to sell things? Particularly the tinkers and snake-oil guys. They would try to trick you into believing what they were selling was something it wasn’t. “Buyer beware” was the motto (well, not their motto, but one nonetheless).

The idea was, if you could get away with it, so be it. Getting “swindled,” “hoodwinked,” “duped,” “conned,” “bamboozled,” “fleeced,” “scammed,” or best of all, “taken for a ride,” was the name of the game. And if the tinker got you, it was your fault. The buyer had to be careful. Not too many felt sorry for their naïveté.

Then Big Brother came along. Laws were passed “protecting” the consumer. Big daddy government came to the rescue to help the poor stupid buyer who didn’t know better. Thank God.

This is not entirely a bad thing. It isn’t good to have swindlers freely functioning in a society, capturing people who are naive and incapable of protecting themselves from deceitful salespeople. But there is a shadow side to this that cannot be overlooked. It inadvertently trains people to stop thinking. They figure there is nothing out there that will cheat them, because big daddy is making sure they are protected, so they lose their skills of skepticism. They become dull thinkers and basically let anything go by without a lot of common-sense scrutiny. Gee, really? Is that what happens?

There was also a sort of “jungle justice” going on in society at the time tinkers roamed the streets. Before laws and ubiquitous law enforcement, people took things into their own hands. Ever hear of “tarred and feathered”? Bad folks who cheated people often got . . .

[SNIP]