Notes from Upstream: Big Government and Big Store

Time for Trump to play a sting on the bureaucracy?

When President Trump called the Department of Education a “con job,” I knew exactly what he meant.

A few years ago, looking for a break from writing even the brief violent episodes I included in my first two action-oriented novels, I came up with a different approach. I wrote a story in which the protagonist triumphs entirely by nonviolent means. The novel became Simple Grifts, and I had a lot of fun writing it.

Research for Simple Grifts took me to David Maurer’s book The Big Con. Maurer was a respected Professor of Linguistics. In the 1930’s, his research into American criminal dialects taught him the patois of grifters, otherwise known as con men, which in turn led him to write about the methods professional grifters use to fleece their victims and the slang they employ for their methods.

Grifters discovered they could enjoy huge success with a con they call “The Big Store.” A Big Store can be any impressive-appearing institution which seems to be generating wealth, preferably by dishonest means. Grifters set up their bogus big store to turn a victim’s FOMO (“fear of missing out”) into big profits for themselves.

Successful grifters work no more slapdashedly than successful surgeons. Just as surgeons slice away their targets’ superfluous flesh, grifters slice away their victims’ superfluous cash, according to specific procedures, following specific steps, in a specific order, each with its own specific terminology:

1. Locating the victim (“Putting the mark up”)

2. Gaining the victim’s confidence (“playing the con for him”)

3. Steering him to meet the inside man (“roping the mark”)

4. Permitting the inside man to show the mark he can make a lot of money (“telling him the tale”)

5. Allowing the victim to make a substantial initial profit (“giving him the convincer”)

6. Determining exactly how much he will invest (“giving him the breakdown”)

7. Sending him home for that amount of money (“putting him on the send”)

8. Playing him against the big store and fleecing him (“taking off the touch”)

9. Getting him out of the way as quietly as possible (“blowing him off”)

10. Forestalling action by the law (“putting in the fix”)

President Trump has seen a lot of con games. He has no trouble spotting federal agencies like the Department of Education for the grifts they are. Our Big Government fraudsters have been playing us taxpayers for suckers for decades. Here’s how they work:

1. Their victims are easy to locate: taxpayers—in other words, us. (Which calls to mind Walt Kelly’s old Pogo Opossum comic strip: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”)

2. “Playing the con” is as easy as pretending that they care for children and their education as much as we do. They then propagate pseudo-scientific “studies” which prove we need to replace common sense learning techniques like phonics and multiplication tables with “modern” methods. Since only “experts” comprehend these new methods, the grifters deprive the rest of us of anything to say against them.

3. The “roper” is any seemingly friendly politician, PhD, EdD or other expert willing to lecture us on some ideology which requires federal intervention into our children’s education. This “inside man” can be any local official with any impressive-looking academic credentials. He knows how to work the system. Since he is on our side, we trust him.

4. The grifters “tell the tale” by promising lots of funding which will flow into local school districts. Of course, they do not mention where the money originally comes from, which is us, paying taxes in those same districts.

5. The “convincer” is the fact that some funds do indeed flow to local school districts as promised (although always tied to requirements which increase the grifters’ centralized federal power).

The grifters’ favorite source for these funds is the mark’s own money coming back to him. Paying the mark out of his own money goes one better than a Ponzi scheme. In a Ponzi, the grifter takes new money from Peter to pay Paul. In our federal scheme, the money coming in from Peter goes not to pay Paul but just to repay Peter.

6. The “breakdown” is the federal budget for the Department of Education. As my wife Susan once wrote about another department, “It matters not if war or peace, its budget always will increase.”

These ongoing increases continue even though bigger spending produces worse outcomes. What do our children get for our $80 billion per year? The answer: worse education than we had before 1979, when we had no Department of Education at all. (I won’t bother to repeat here the familiar evidence for this undeniable fact.)

7. The grifters “put us on the send” when they demand bigger budgets, often because of the urgent need to repair the harm from their own previous failures. In return for all the money, they provide our children only bogus achievement awards, as well as empty credentials which prove only our young people’s willingness to parrot whatever they are told.

8. The grifters “take off the touch” when they award themselves bloated grants and salaries and all the other “waste, fraud and abuse” the Trump Administration is just beginning to smoke out.

9. (& 10). They’ve been “blowing us off” and “putting in the fix” for years, with the active support of the federal judges they venue-shop for at the slightest threat to their power and money.

The issue now is whether we will allow their grift to continue.

Back in Maurer’s day, one response from their marks surprised the grifters. It troubled David Maurer too. It should disturb us today. Even after the marks had lost their money and should have realized they had been conned, they came back for more punishment. They refused to acknowledge that they had been fleeced, in part because they loved the exciting experience of being in on a deal and in part because no self-respecting human wants to admit he has been a knucklehead. Many grifters fleeced the same marks over and over with the same cons.

In plotting the hit movie The Sting (Paul Newman and Robert Redford), Hollywood followed the above canonical grifter scheme step by step. To make sure the audience did not miss the con’s workings, the movie even displayed titles in advance of each specific step.

What was true a hundred years ago is true today. It’s just old wine in new bottles. Content does not change, even if form does. Our Big Government is just another form of Big Store, that is, another new bottle in which to package and sell the same old sour vintage. It is long past time to dump it out.

Max Cossack is an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code). The novel he references is Simple Grifts. He lives in Arizona with his wife in a house besieged by fearful feral felines who refuse to be suckered and who flee the friendly female who feeds them.