[]{#housealwayswin label=“housealwayswin”}
It is equally impossible to ban human greed, stupidity, and self-confidence. The state is completely powerless here. Moreover, as is usually the case, prohibiting activities that exploit human stupidity leads to consequences worse than the activity itself, since stupidity remains constant while risks rise, and therefore losses increase. Swindlers will always find their way to gullible citizens, and methods of “relatively honest extraction of money” will only become more sophisticated. It is better that they do this legally and simply, as, for example, casinos.
Generally speaking, attempts to shield oneself from reality usually produce results opposite to what was expected. That is, rather than people learning from their own mistakes and others’, drawing conclusions, and subsequently behaving more cautiously, the state tries to make it seem as if nothing happened. A classic idea of this sort is bank deposit insurance and various state guarantees provided to depositors. Currently, Ukrainian trade unions, anticipating the collapse of MMM, have taken up this issue. They propose to “improve, deepen, and expand” these guarantees, bringing them to the marasmus existing in EU countries and the USA. This means that people who deposited money in a bad bank and people who deposited in a good one risk equally. A banker has no reason to conduct business well — depositors will not punish a bad banker by leaving him, since the state encourages depositors to be stupid sheep and not to care how good a particular bank is. Worse still, since the state itself does not create anything useful, state guarantees are nothing other than our taxes. In short, we pay stupid depositors and reward bad bankers. For example, in the case of the collapse of MMM, various state funds and guarantees mean that we will pay MMM depositors. In other words, the state will punish those who showed common sense and did not participate in the pyramid, and reward those who invested money in MMM.
Well, and, of course, any bans benefit the repressive apparatus of the state, and therefore corruption and organized crime. Therefore, returning to our topic, the best thing that can be done with MMM is to leave everything as it is.
The only thing I would like to suggest as a “solution to the problem” is the possibilities opened up by a betting contract. I do not know how widely it is used in Ukrainian practice, but, essentially, in the case of MMM and bank deposits, we are dealing with a bet. Moreover, this is not a game but precisely a bet, because in a game the skill of the participants matters, while here it does not. Neither Mavrodi nor the banker knows exactly when MMM will collapse, or when the bank will go bankrupt. I think “society as a whole” would benefit if lawyers only considered transactions in monetary pyramids as bets.