Comment by benreesman

I think I agree with OP’s premise that driving “fraud” to “zero” is kind of a fool’s errand: some people, like Bender from Futurama, “just love crime, just love stealin’ things…da dah da”.

But for me at least, it grates more than a little whenever Self-Assured Tech Person With Logic and Statistics In Hand assures you, dear reader, that if you actually crunched the numbers instead of gobbling up pablum from the Washington Post like a lemming, would in fact realize the Free Enterprise Is Going Just Great.

The World Economic Forum has sufficient data to do a plausible “Social Mobility Index” on 82/195 UN-recognized sovereign states: and its just one of many data points that Capitalism Muzzled by Social Democracy is in fact what you want if “people having a shot at doing better than their parents in large numbers” is a priority.

I’m old enough to have watched the effects of the Operational Research PhD’s at Megacorp “optimizing” every angstrom of human joy and dignity out of living in a Free Enterprise Zone. You can’t do anything these days that involves commerce without bumping into this. Friendly dare for US readers: try invalidating a credit card number in a way that stops every recurring auto-pay that has barnacled itself onto your economic ship is forced to get you to re-auth it. Good luck.

So while driving “fraud” to “zero” might be silly, we can almost surely take a big whack out of it by making a salutary example or 1000 of companies that have “optimized” the right amount of paying OSHA fines rather than allowing bathroom breaks to “all of them”, or “optimized” the right amount of cheap and fast municipal fiber to “zero”, or the right amount of employees to force just below the “gets benefits” line to “whatever the maximum is”.

I worked in butcher shops and call centers and retail in the Clinton Administration, and boy were they after you for every dime. Having been an over-privileged techie for the last decade or two I’ve personally been largely insulated from how much worse it’s gotten since then, but the kids I grew up with for the most part haven’t, and it’s a little hard to regard the significant fraction of them with some “grey at best” side hustle as doing anything other than scamming the scammers who have Corporate Backing.