Recently, a popular online community discussed legal things they believe should be illegalized immediately. I didn’t see this one listed, but I’ll add that multi-level marketing (MLMs), otherwise known as network marketing, are pyramid schemes that found a loophole to operate legally, and it’s predatory. Nonetheless, here are the things the forum decided on. Do you agree?
1. Alcohol
Countless forum members agree that alcohol should be illegal. Drunk drivers kill over 15,000 people a year in the U.S. alone. Furthermore, consuming alcohol is responsible for 5.1% of global diseases and injuries.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), worldwide, it is responsible for over three million deaths every year from the harmful use of alcohol. This represents 5.3% of all deaths. High blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, fatty liver disease, hepatitis, cirrhosis, fibrosis, and digestive problems are some of the issues that derive from drinking alcohol. It also causes a lot of strife in relationships.
2. Congress Owning Stocks While Passing Laws to Benefit Their Portfolios
This is the obvious answer, yet our ridiculously corrupt system continues to allow politicians to get away with it. One adds, “And their spouses.” I’m getting Pelosi vibes here. It happens on both sides of the fence. Others note it should also be illegal for them to determine their own salaries. Hard agree. And while we are at it, let’s immediately impose two-term limits on them.
3. Price Gouging
YES! All price gouging should be immediately illegalized. My grocery store marked cilantro up from $.79 to $1.89 because of the pandemic in 2020, and it never came back down. One user agrees with me and adds all price gouging, including event tickets, sneakers, collectibles, consumer electronics, stocks, or housing.
4. Spam Emails
While there are more pressing things on this list, spam emails are so annoying. I receive emails from people I never signed up with, and they always start it like we are best friends. Someone notes, “When you learn how much energy it takes to send emails, they become infuriating.”
5. Paying for College Transcripts
Universities charging you money to access your official school transcripts is bogus. A respondent explains applying for a job at their old alma mater. They made him pay a 3rd party to send them their own transcripts to prove to the school that he went to that school. “Facepalm.”
6. Convenience Fees
Having to pay money to pay bills under the guise of “convenience fees” should be illegal. For example, an apartment renter explains they must pay a $15 fee to pay their rent online. Why? So they intentionally cause the rental office time, money, and staff by delivering a monthly money order. Countless others agree it should be cheaper than mailing a physical copy of the bill payment through snail mail.
7. Child Beauty Pageants
They’re sick and attract sickos. Numerous thread contributors suggest it’s a lot of “unattractive mothers living their beauty fantasies out through their children.” Whatever it is, it’s creepy and feels wrong.
Little girls shouldn’t be dolled up with adult hair and makeup and competing in swimsuit contests. The vanity you’re teaching them during their most impressionable ages is terrible. Sadly, I’m willing to bet many of them grow up putting their self-worth into their looks.
8. Political Lobbying
“Bribing Politicians— I mean, Lobbying.” This user was not alone in their assertions. Several agree that lobbyists own Congress. Hence their unwillingness to represent the people’s best interest. “It’s antithetical to the concept of democracy.”
9. Difficult Unsubscription Methods
It shouldn’t take two seconds to sign-up for something and two hours to unsubscribe. However, many express having to unsubscribe from solicitation emails they never signed up for frequently.
Furthermore, they have to unsubscribe from them again a few months later. It’s maddening. Others brought up Planet Fitness as a notorious offender of being challenging to quit. In the words of Chandler Bing, “I want to quit the gym!”
10. Payday Loans
Payday loans are a predatory business that numerous users in the thread agree (as do I) should be illegal. One man adds, “Interest rates over 18% used to be criminal in the U.S.” New York had illegalized payday loans, and many hope it will spread through the states.
11. Family Vloggers
Numerous people agree that “Children who are being exploited on the internet under the guise of mommy blogging, or family blogging,” should be immediately illegalized.
12. Targeted Advertisements
Targeted advertising sounds nice and pretty, but all of your information is being used and sold to third parties for them to profit from. One suggest, “It should automatically have you opted out of sharing your information with third parties and allow you to opt-in to see more targeted ads.”
13. Robo Telemarketing
Are you sick of Robo telemarketing calls blowing up your phone? Who isn’t? I never answer my “scam likely” alerts on my iPhone. However, I remember having a landline—my God. They got ridiculously annoying and even sneaky. The last several times I answered a robocall, the automated voice tricked me into believing it was a real person (at first).
14. Insurance Companies Dealing With Healthcare
Once upon a time, I briefly did medical billing. Talk about the biggest scam in the history of not cool. You learn that the doctors bill out much higher than services are worth because the insurance companies negotiate. Blueshield and BlueCross pay X, Aetna pays X, Kaiser pays X, and Medicaid and Medicare pay the least of X.
So they depend on making that up through others. So what happens to the uninsured? They get seriously – you know what. These people are already the poorest because they can’t even afford insurance! So they allow them to make payment plans on seriously inflated bills that keep them broke and struggling to pay way more than any insurance company.
People with insurance love to say, “Well, they let you make payment plans.” Right. But get real here. Suppose Aetna pays $275 and Medicare pays $125. In that case, the poor, uninsured patient should not be responsible for an inflated $500 for the same service. It’s absurd.
This 100% should be illegal. Things should cost what they cost, and you pay it (add vehicles to this). It’s supposed to be about health, but this validates it’s not. Oh, this one makes me so mad.
15. Civil Asset Forfeiture
Civil forfeiture is a process where law enforcement officers take assets from people suspected of involvement with a crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing.
Civil Asset forfeiture is a scam that many people voted as something that should be illegalized immediately. One suggests, “Civil Asset Forfeiture is one of the most blatant holes in constitutional rights granted in the U.S.”
Another user noted that it’s stupid. For example, “inanimate property isn’t capable of having means, motive, or opportunity to do anything, much less commit a crime.” Therefore, there shouldn’t be any asset forfeiture before a guilty verdict that proves the asset was a proceed from crime.
16. Timeshares
“Timeshares. The entire industry is slimy and dirty. It is tantamount to completely legalized fraud.” This user explains that timeshare salespeople are scammy individuals who trap potential customers into presentations and manipulative sales pitches while hiding high timeshare costs from them. Furthermore, they are a terrible investment with no return.
A thread contributor says that once he was roped into a Hawaiian one years ago, the salesperson dared repeatedly use his dead wife in his guilt pitch (framed picture on the desk and all). “I wish I had bought a timeshare when she was still alive. I would have had so many memories with her.” Wow.
17. Prescription Drug Advertisements
The non-stop prescription drug programming through advertisements is sick (pun intended). A Brit confesses during their visit, they were surprised by it and added that hearing Americans refer to COVID-19 vaccines by name was “strange and eerie.” For Americans paying attention, it only validates that we are a “corporate-controlled society.”
Finally, someone recommended the book Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. It’s an “eye-opening” look into the Sackler family, corporate greed, pharmaceutical advertising, and the opioid epidemic. They state that the United States opioid epidemic is linked to “specific actions taken by the Sackler family and their company Purdue Pharma.”
18. Tanning Beds
The number of White women and former presidents who glow an unnatural orange is daunting. But unfortunately, the practice of using them is too common among young ladies. A concerned citizen suggests, “The cancer correlation is too clear now to make this a pre-prom tradition.”
19. Subrogation
In subrogation, health insurance companies can claim an accident victim’s personal injury settlement to recoup the money they spent on that insured person’s medical bills. In most cases, they take most of the people’s settlement despite the individual paying them for health insurance. Hospitals do the same thing. It amounts to stealing injury settlements from their clients, and one states, “It’s evil.”
20. Paparazzi
While the paparazzi are more of a problem for celebrities, it doesn’t negate the fact that it should be illegal to constantly stalk and harass people for photographs and videos to profit from without permission.
21. Conversion Therapy
Conversation therapy is a terrible practice of trying to change people in the LGBTQIA+. Wiki states, “Conversion therapy is the pseudoscientific practice of attempting to change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to align with heterosexual and cisgender norms.” People are gay. You can’t “ungay” someone, and several people in the thread agree this should be illegal.
22. For-Profit Prisons
It’s no surprise that for-profit prisons made this list as they are a conflict of interest. An individual adds, “Even government-run prisons in the U.S. have massive amounts of privatized profits due to all the contracted goods and services.”
Another further states, “Sadly, this ‘right’ is protected almost as well as the right to bear arms. America loves slave labor, and they wrote it into the 13th Amendment. Very hard to undo.” Do you agree?
23. Being Wealthy and Not Paying Taxes
Remember when half the population thought the fact that Donald Trump paid no taxes in 2020 made him smart and a good leader? Meanwhile, those same people refuse to ever vote yes to taxes to fund schools. Craziness.
People complain so much about paying them and then praise a con man getting out of them instead of paying his fair share. Nonetheless, yeah. It should absolutely be illegal to be wealthy and not pay taxes because they’ve managed to find loopholes in the system. According to numerous users, it’s disgraceful and criminal.
24. Churches Not Paying Taxes
People are more than ready for churches to start paying their fair share in taxes. A forum member adds non-profit organizations should start paying taxes. “Spending .24 cents on every dollar towards their cause while the rest goes to ‘administration’ should be illegal.”
25. Scientology
Speaking of not paying taxes, Scientology is a cult masquerading as a church to avoid paying taxes. It’s an absolute travesty that they get away with it and much more, including member abuse, family disconnection, and fraudulent front groups posing as helpful programs in the schools (Applied Scholastics), communities (Youth for Human Rights International (YHRI), and substance abuse facilities (Narconon).
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Source: Reddit.
Elizabeth Ervin is the owner of Sober Healing. She is a freelance writer passionate about opioid recovery and has celebrated breaking free since 09-27-2013. She advocates for mental health awareness and encourages others to embrace healing, recovery, and Jesus.