Fine Print

Through pure coincidence, I read in the same morning this review of Ellen Shulz' new book Retirement Heist and this story (part one) about Ken's response to a toner scam. I noticed that the toner scam article says this (emphasis added):

how can it be fraudulent if the invoice says right on it “Thank you for your business. This is not a statement for services rendered but for preventative maintenance”?

Simple: fraud law doesn’t work like that.

I noticed as well that Shulz explains, in part, how corporations were able to unilaterally alter what everyone considered contractual obligations this way:

Union employees had physical legal contracts that had been collectively bargained that said, "We promise you lifetime coverage." So the employers claimed, "We didn't mean your lifetime, we meant the life of the contract," and it worked.

This is pretty interesting. Legal fine print sometimes acts as an effective tool for deception, changing what appears to be the spirit of a written agreement, and sometimes the spirit of the agreement takes precedence.

This is not, of course, very surprising; it's deeply embedded in our collective understanding that "fine print" can and does deceive. The legal profession maintains itself in large part because of this; lawyers are versed in very specialized language and procedure that we all agree is obscure, counterintuitive, and often intended to deceive. 

I'll assume that the fine print in the toner scam example was also written by lawyers (this is arguable, but that's what for the sake of argument means). Both of these "agreements" are relatively unilateral. The cases have other similarlties.

For one thing, the victims and employees don't have full awareness of what's being done to them. The contractual verbiage associated with employment is intentionally obtuse, and employees' "choice" is not to accept it or not; it's "have a job or not". Employment agreements don't differ much, and the obtuse legal framework they all operate within is the same. Employees don't typically notice what's being done to them. In the scam case, similarly, victims don't notice what's being done to them.

The intention is the same in both cases: bluntly, it's theft. 

The difference lies in the perpetrators, and in the outcome. Characterize someone as a "scammer" and you've made a presumption about what the outcome should be. Scamming is obviously bad and should be prohibited, punished, stopped, not allowed, and so on. But characterize someone as a "businessman" and your presumptions are (probably) quite different. 

Laws in these cases are fairly different based largely on who you are. 

Now start substituting labels. For "businessman" and "scammer", what if you substitute "white man" and "black man"? "Man" and "woman"? "Straight" and "gay"? "Muslim" and "Christian"?

We give a lot of lip service to the idea that "we're a nation governed by law, not by men". Some people whistle past graveyards, too.