Jeff Paul’s Shortcuts to Millions
This is really no good. It would be just silly and laughable, except that I don’t watch that much TV and I’ve still managed to see this infomercial 3 or 4 times as I’m flipping through channels.
It drew me do some research on snake-oil peddlers. This is what I got on wikipedia.
“Snake oil originally came from China, where it is called shéyóu (蛇油). There, it was used as a remedy for inflammation and pain in rheumatoid arthritis, bursitis, and other similar conditions. Snake oil is still used as a pain reliever in China. Fats and oils from snakes are higher in eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) than other sources, so snake oil was actually a plausible remedy for joint pain as these are thought to have inflammation-reducing properties.[citation needed] Snake oil is still sold in traditional Chinese pharmacy stores.
Chinese labourers on railroad gangs — involved in building the Transcontinental Railroad to link North America coast to coast — gave snake oil to Europeans with joint pain. When rubbed on the skin at the painful site, snake oil was claimed to bring relief. This claim was ridiculed by rival medicine salesmen, especially those selling patent medicines. In time, snake oil became a generic name for many compounds marketed as panaceasplacebo effect might provide some relief for whatever the problem might have been. or miraculous remedies, whose ingredients were usually secret, unidentified, or mis-characterized — and mostly inert or ineffective, although the
Since there was no Federal regulation in the USA concerning safety and effectiveness of drugs until the 1906 Food and Drugs Act,[3] and various medicine salesmen or manufacturers seldom had enough skills in analytical chemistry to analyze the contents of snake oil, it became the archetype of hoax. American snake fats have EPA contents markedly lower than those of the Chinese water snake. Thus the American snake oils were even less effective in relieving joint pain than the original Chinese snake oil — further promoting the hoax stereotype.
The snake oil peddler became a stock character in Western movies: a travelling “doctor” with dubious credentials, selling some medicine (such as snake oil) with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence, typically bogus. To enhance sales, an accomplice in the crowd (a “shill”) would often “attest” the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm. The “doctor” would prudently leave town before his customers realized that they had been cheated. This practice is also called “grifting” and its practitioners “grifters”.
The term snake oil peddling is used as a derogatory term to describe such practices.”
Free-Market champions can’t wave their arms and jump up and down. Communism is dead. Capitalism has won. The only threat now is to fall into the trap of blind ideology.
In his 2nd inaugural address, in the midst of the Great Depression caused in part by unbridled Free-Market Capitalism, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said:
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals. We know now that it is bad economics.”
At least in the Western movies, the “doctor” would prudently leave before he was found out as a shyster by the locals. These guys are still in our face on TV around the clock. Come-on, its 2009! Why are we letting this crap go on? How is allowing Jeff Paul, or whoever is behind this scam, a good thing? What a waste of time and resources.
