Quote:
Originally Posted by calvindog
Smarter than you. Yes there are tons of unethical behavior in the areas of law, finance, medicine. But to suggest that the amount of wrongdoers in these areas is the same as in the baseball card hobby is laughable. Look at the top auction houses: Heritage, Legendary, Memory Lane, Mile High. How many of the heads have either been convicted of fraud or are targets of federal grand juries?
And David, I can assure you that the percentage of doctors convicted of felonies is a tiny fraction of of a fraction of 1%. Want to bet it's higher in our hobby?
Finally, our hobby is completely unregulated, with no bodies of oversight -- unlike the areas of law, medicine, finance, etc. Doesn't that at least give you a slight clue as to the relative incidence of bad behavior?
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I sure wish I was so smart that I could claim a certainty without being able to cite actual facts. Tell me exactly how many hobby figures you know to have criminal records, then? Not under investigation or suspicion, but actual convictions? And just to bring it back to my original point, I was only trying to say that there's an enormous amount of hobby activity transacted honestly every day online, at shows, in auctions, between individuals, etc., and that, in relation to all of that, the extent of illegal and unethical behavior is actually quite small, just as it is in the other fields mentioned for all the justified publicity the dark side gets. As for your self-declared brain power, at least I'm smart enough not to resort to childish name-calling that would expose me as a jerk. And thanks for the props, Joe, it's people like you and so many other classy individuals I know in the hobby that prompted me to defend its reputation.
Hank Thomas