[Applejinx]

Statistically, you can't have that. No matter what you want, a sufficiently motivated conman will be able to find the dumbest person, for instance by the methodology used by Nigerian-prince scammers: put out bait that's bad, to pre-screen for people dumb enough to be that kind of deluded.

Then you can say 'oh, that scam was so obvious that people ought to have seen through it!' but it was explicitly designed to be obvious because, statistically, THERE WILL be someone (perhaps a nice but foolish someone!) who does fall for it.

Therefore, you can't have an informed public. Ever. It's a matter of how you handle the edge cases. We don't have rules making things like murder, etc. bad just because MOST people don't deserve to be straight-up murdered. We have them because it needs not to be too tempting to murder in those cases where the guy REALLY deserved it… it's inhibiting the potential murderer on general principles, not making value judgements on why to protect extremely deserving victims.

This is not the case in the financial industry, and the consequences we pay for that might be pretty dire. In the financial industry they think they can say things like 'I want an informed public', and they think they can make entire business models on screwing deserving victims, and it's not really about the victims, it's about social pressure stopping people from being monstrous on general principles. And again, nothing at all stops bankers from being monstrous. Indeed, it's a survival characteristic: we select for that.

[hueving]

If people are stupid enough to enter into mortgages with payments they can't afford then they shouldn't be allowed to enter into any kind of legal contract. No credit cards, no payment plans, no cell phone plans, no insurance, nothing. Honestly, they shouldn't even be allowed to choose what they eat since they aren't certified nutritionists.

Your comparison to Nigerian scammers is irrelevant because there is nothing legitimate about a Nigerian prince scam, it's just stealing money. Millions of people have mortgages they can afford and pay for them just fine.