Dating myself here, I was a kid when that show was new. I did love it.

So I am watching a repeat and the axiom the more things change the more they stay the same, seems to hold up.

In this episode they get a call to a dispute at a used car lot. The sleazy used car salesman got the "fruit picker"(Mexican) to sign an agreement to put a deposit on a test drive which was over priced and was supposed to be given back to the Mexican upon the condition that the car came back without a scratch, in which in the episode it did. The used car salesman refused to give the deposit back. He eventually did because his secretary blew the whistle on him knowing he was taking advantage of the poor customer.

But what was true back then is far worse today in that our entire economy isn't about doing the right thing. It is about money paying of law makers to slant to making the attitude "Whatever you can get away with" legal. In the contractual mice print scams and racketeering via the false premise that the private sector can never do wrong.

It does wrong all the time. Oil is a monopoly. our dependency on foreign oil is at a 15 year low but prices have not gone down. Diamonds are only expensive because of the monopoly of the market. If the monopoly were broken they would not cost as much. Banks and housing, and insurance and drug companies, and big business in general has learned from this model, all the way to the casino mentality of Wall Street where they rig the game to privatized profits and socialized loses. It hasn't killed mom and pop shops, but it has made cost of living and pay gap explode all for the self interest of profit through an extraction market, just like the sleazy used car salesmen in that episode.

No one should begrudge even the luck and risk of investment or wealth in and of itself. But if all it does is consume and extract and does nothing to improve those who do the actual work down to the lowest paid, just like that used car salesman, it hurts all of us.

(Waits for Beyond's excuses and false accusations of wanting to rob him. He'd be right if his right to vote were suddenly taken away)