Multilevel marketing: a disaster that should be outlawed

It's true a few people have made money on MLM, but almost invariably they are either the founders or people who have found a profitable sideline they have somehow injected into the mix, such as my sister, who made a paltry hundred grand or so in several years, or the notorious Dexter Yager , who has made something like a hundred million. A few others have built huge "downlines" but most of those have not only worked incredibly hard themselves but have been able to "tune out" the fact that most of their downline has failed at "The Business", losing years of their lives and often everything they owned chasing a dream based on quixtar...I mean, quicksand!

MLM does not work. It can't.

The Vandruffs are Christian fundamentalists, a group I have little in common with, but apparently they are at least both sincere and have some basic honesty-qualities not found in a good portion, at least, of the MLMers who are all vocal believers in public but whose behavior has usually been pretty reprobate.

I used to be a child. I also used to be a libertarian (but I repeat myself). When, as the Good Book says, I was a libertarian, I used to speak like a libty, reason like a libty, and generally make a pompous pain in the fundament of myself as libtys do. Somehow, I grew out of that nonsense. The libertarian position regarding MLM is that it is just another kind of business that violates no moral principles.

But then, they say that of prostitution, drug dealing, usury, and other things no sane society puts up with much too.

MLM should be made illegal. I'm not talking about Avon or Fuller Brush or Tupperware or womyn-only dildo vendors. They're not MLM: there's no dealers-selling-dealerships. I mean Amway/Quixtar/Alticor and the hundreds of imitators they've spawned. Outlaw the business model itself, lock, stock and barrel. Outlaw it for the same reason we outlaw narcotics: because it proves disastrous for enough people to have access to it that the harm in enforcing the laws against it is outweighed by the harm in its availability. A business that 95% of people fail at is not a tenable business.