I am sure that corporate fraud has been around for decades – or centuries – maybe even millennia. The VW mess provides just one recent example of business leaders cheating the public to add green to their wallets. One contributing factor to their actions was probably the low probability that they would ever have to pay personally for the crime.

Our tolerance of such dishonesty is also  demonstrated in the popularity of Donald Trump. Here is a man who has defrauded large numbers of investors and workers of hard-earned savings and pay in order to add to his own wealth. He does not seem to have paid much of anything for his crimes. Is he an example of the part of the American dream that honors success obtained on the backs of people with little power?

Years ago I had an interesting summer job in which I was hired to sell colds products to independent drug stores for a relatively large American corporation and was invited back the second summer to supervise some of the new college sales force. It was during that second summer, after I had learned from a number of small business owners that the college sales agents had added additional products to their summer orders without their approval. Because larger orders provided more points in the sales contests, and because the college sales agents would be long gone by the time the orders were delivered in the fall, the contests provided opportunities for the sales agents to pad orders in order to increase their own contest winnings.

The seeking of personal gain without regard for people who could be hurt by our own greed has indeed been a feature of the human experience and the American way of life for quite some time. And that is why regulations and oversight are needed in the financial sector, construction and home repair, educational enterprises, and so many other ventures. Let’s not let the lawmakers who are in the pockets of big oil , Wall Street, or the NRA dismiss the need for sensible regulation so that the American people are not continually bilked out of billions of dollars and put at risk.