Liars who make money on their lies are fraudsters, and fraud needs to have criminal repercussions
Yes, LOTS of people lie to make money. Yes, all those people are doing something wrong. And yes, that wrong thing is bad enough for society that we should punish it.
"Everything" is not fraud. Telling lies to make money is the definition of fraud. If you think that describes "everything" that happens in the economy... Well, stop telling lies.
And yes, lots of fraud is impossible to prove because the actors know the law. Patent trolling comes to mind.
And yes, lots of powerful people commit fraud throughout their career in impunity. Fraud is normal.
However, the normalcy of fraud and of getting away with deviancy does not make fraud acceptable.
I'm routinely astounded by how surprised people are to learn that telling lies to make money is illegal.
Tech in particular needs to do something about the fact fraud has reached meme status in our industry ('fake it till you make it').
I don't think people are surprised that it is fraud, just that there isn't a better way to prosecute it. If ExxonMobil's board hired a hitman to kill a competitor's CEO, I think people would hope that the response is to prosecute the board for murder and not merely for fraudulently claiming their company is valuable when they were actually relying on destabilizing their competitor. No one's defending the fraud, it just doesn't seem like the most important problem here.
Oh, look, Matt Levine actually references this case at the top of that article. Unexpected recursion detected.
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...