If you don't think Wall Street needs to be taken down a notch or two, Wall Street will make the case for you.

The rant really gets off on a bad foot early when the douchenozzle says, "I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years."

This is like a chef who cooks with tainted meat saying, "I didn't hear anyone complaining when they had plenty of food on their plates... but once they got food poisoning, they had to find a scapegoat!"

Scapegoating is the act of singling out a person or a group for unmerited blame. Scapegoats don't deserve the negative treatment they receive. Placing the blame for the Red Sox lost 1986 World Series entirely on Bill Buckner's shoulders is scapegoating. Blaming Jeffrey Dahmer for 17 murders is not. It's righteous blame.

If you build my house with frayed wiring and use pine needles, dried leaves, and oily rags for insulation, I might not notice at the time of purchase. I might even live in the house for a year or two and be happy with it, but when it burns down and I find out why, it's hardly "scapegoating" to point a finger of blame your direction.

Wall Street wants to pat itself on the back for creating wealth for years and years, but ignore that nothing was actually created. When you build a house, you are creating something. The economy improves because you have taken wood, bricks, wires, carpeting, drywall, pipes and shingles and put them together in a way that makes them more valuable as a whole than the parts were worth on their own.

Wall Street doesn't build houses. It creates nothing. It merely transfers wealth from one source to another without adding value. Wall Street cannot create value any more than the US Mint can create money by printing it. The more money that is printed, the less each dollar is worth. Likewise, the more houses that are built, the less each house will be worth. But, ignoring the primary law of economics, Wall Street convinced itself and its investors that demand for houses was infinite and therefore supply could never keep up, resulting in prices continuing to rise forever.

At best, Wall Street ignored a simple economic rule that anyone with a fifth grade social studies education should know, and negligently destroyed our economy. At worst, Wall Street manipulated markets for short term gains, maliciously indifferent to the inevitable destruction it would wreak upon our economy. Either way, the blame is merited.

Over the weekend, I received a letter made to look like a bill for the registration of this domain with the exception of some fine print stating that it is not a bill.

This letter should be at the forefront of any and all discussion of economic reform.

President Obama is insisting we reform Wall Street and vows he'll veto any legislation that "doesn't bring the derivatives market under control." What constitutes "control" is debatable. In fact, we really don't know how either side of the aisle wants our economy to run. The one thing we can count on in the weeks and months to come is talking points and key terms that will be repeated and regurgitated regardless of their truth. And the one phrase we'll hear more than any other will be "free market."

But what is the free market? To what extent should we support the free market? If child labor can be hired for less than adult labor, the free market would dictate that a good factory owner should hire kids. For that matter, the free market would tend toward slavery. Now, clearly we have legislation that outlaws slavery, but one could argue that such legislation unfairly regulates the free market.

However, I'm going to assume most congressmen don't support the return of slavery--okay, maybe Jim DeMint--but we still need to know what we should expect of our economy moving forward. And this letter sets the stage for that debate perfectly.

This letter notes that the domain registration on jakehateseverything.com is running out "soon." It reminds me that if I want to keep the domain, I'll need to pay to re-register. It never claims to be from my domain registrar. It even uses the phrase "switch" to indicate that I'd be changing companies. And it promises an opportunity to save money by taking advantage of deals on multiyear registrations.

All of these things are factually true, but still the presentation of the letter is a clear attempt at deceit. The company behind it is hoping to take advantage of people who've registered a domain or had a domain registered for them by a relative or friend. By presenting a bill-looking advertisement, the goal is to have some suckers sign off and send in a check for quadruple the amount it should cost to register their domain without even thinking. I will be renewing jakehateseverything.com for nine dollars through my current registrar, while this letter offers me the "deal" of two-years for $50. The "deal" being that one year with this company is $30, so I'd save ten bucks by going for two.

The question is whether this is a business that should or should not continue to operate in our economy henceforth.

Some will argue that the person who first took the time to craft this letter, to search for soon-to-expire domains, and to mail out these "non-bills" should be rewarded for his ingenuity. He's not lying about anything, and it isn't his fault if people don't bother to thoroughly read a document before signing it. And unlike Nigerian princes and bank presidents who are simply out to steal the money of their targets, this company is serving its customers, albeit at a grossly inflated rate.

And that is a cornerstone of marketing, isn't it? The comic store where I used to work prided itself on not giving discounts, instead relying on being the cool attitude of the store and the customer service to win over customers from other stores. The comics aren't any different and the "customer service" consists mostly of upselling customers the way Amazon's "People who bought items in your cart also purchased" feature does.

If legislation were introduced to outlaw such practices, it would be a perfect representation of the "nanny state" Fox News commentators love to warn us about.

The same could be said for predatory lenders, the banks that set out to give loans to people they knew couldn't pay them back because they knew there was money to be made on credit default swaps when the houses foreclosed. Why should the government protect someone who is too stupid to understand that he can't afford a $500,000 home on a salary of $40,000 a year?

A recent episode of This American Life examined the actions of a Wall Street hedge fund that made billions of dollars by creating bonds it knew were likely to collapse, then buying insurance against the collapse. Days later, the Justice Department announced it was filing fraud charges against Goldman-Sachs for a similar practice.

The company in the story linked about was doing the equivalent of building a $100,000 house with frayed wiring and using oily rags for insulation, then buying a $10 million fire insurance policy on it. The company lost millions on the failed bonds, but made billions on the insurance. In fact, much of the housing credit boom--which fueled the predatory lenders mentioned previously--was a direct result of this company demanding riskier credit pools to include in its bonds.

Should such behavior be punished or rewarded?

For the past week, I've had to take my kids to school every morning. Considering I stay up until 3AM or so most nights writing, you can imagine that A) I didn't get much writing done this week, B) I didn't get much sleep this week, and C) I'm not very happy about either A or B.

Making matters worse is the reason I had to drop the kids off all five days last week instead of my customary one. Their mother, who teaches fourth grade at another school, needed to go in 45 minutes earlier than usual to help run Santa's Secret Store.

For those who don't remember Santa's Secret Store from your elementary school days, let me summarize. A company carts in a bunch of cheap crap that ranges in price from a quarter to fifteen dollars, touting it all as affordable gifts. Teachers run the cash register and at the end of the week, the company comes back, counts up the sales, and gives the school a percentage of the sales to use for field trips or special projects or paying teachers salaries so layoffs can be delayed for another month. Whatever.What's worst about this whole fiasco is the false hope it gives the children. I had to fight it in my own children every day as they begged to "go to Mommy's Santa Store" after school. They pulled change from their piggy banks, eagerly anticipating buying presents for me and their mother and their grandparents.

Economist Joel Waldfogel has a new book out called Scroogenomics. I haven't read it yet, but I have heard several interviews with him and am intrigued by the ideas behind it. An expansion on a paper Waldfogel wrote 15 years ago, the book makes the case that gift giving is almost always an economic loser.

To quantify the value lost in gift giving, Waldfogel compared the price someone paid for something to the price the recipient would have been willing to pay themselves. For example, a couple of my friends are getting customized NFL jerseys of their favorite teams with their own names and numbers. These cost $100 each (the website had a sale on Black Friday so I got them for a bit less, but we'll use $100 as the price for this example). My friend Rob is a Packers fan, so I got him a Packers jersey with his last name and the number 99 on the back. If Rob is asked, "How much would you pay to buy that jersey for yourself?" and he answers, "$75," then I have wasted $25 from an economic standpoint.

My goal isn't to dissect Waldfogel's argument too much--I will delete the three paragraphs I've written here and expand on them in a separate post--but rather to use it to make the case that Santa's Secret Shops are among the worst offenders. After all, how much would you pay for one of these?The sane among you answered, "Nothing. What the hell am I going to do with that?" If you found out that someone paid $3 to buy it for you, not only would that be a loss of $3 per Waldfogel's calculations, there would be the added loss of other unquantified values like how much respect you lose for the person who paid $3 for a little rubber piece of crap, the disappointment you feel for the gift you received versus the anticipation you had for it prior to unwrapping it, and the disappointment the gift giver feels when it becomes clear you didn't like the fun, google-eyed rubber sunburst he bought you.

Santa's Secret Shop's greatest crime is selling itself to children as a place to buy great gifts for grown ups. With this in mind, kids scrape together some cash, whether by asking mom and dad or by busting open their piggy banks, and go to the shop, expecting to find gifts that mom, dad, grandma, and grandpa are going to love.

I remember in fifth grade, we had a Santa's Secret Shop set up at my school, so I took a couple dollars hoping to find something for my parents. I don't remember what I got my dad, but I settled on a big pencil for my mom. It was blue and about a foot long and almost an inch in diameter (too big to fit in a pencil sharpener, you'll note). At the time, I recall thinking, "What the hell is my mom going to do with this?" but I felt pressured to get something there because I wanted to be able to say I took care of everything by myself. I didn't need Dad to take me out to the mall to get Mom's present and vice versa.

On the plus side, I didn't get anything like this.This is the worst of the worst that Santa's Secret Shop has to offer. At $8.50, this adjustable-to-fit-the-head-of-any-dad cap is out of the price range of most shoppers. The one afternoon I dropped in with the kids, about 60-70 kids came through the shop and I don't think anyone had more than $5. And therein lies the tragedy. $8.50 is a lot of money just to disappoint your dad. Hell, kids are doing it for free every day!

But the lost value far exceeds the $8.50, which, it should be noted, is a huge amount of money for a fourth grader to spend on anything, much less something that is only going to cause family strife. There is also the frustration his father is going to feel, knowing that his child spent the equivalent of a decent Friday's entrée on an ugly, stupid hat that will never get worn.

At least, that's what he hopes. But that's not the case at all. Unlike the yellow rubber thing that can be tossed in a drawer or a "#1 Grandma" ornament that can be hung on the back of the Christmas tree for a few weeks every year or the foam rubber keychain that can be used to hold the key to the garage, back gate, or utility room, the hat serves only one purpose.

And dad only has one head.

Receipt of this hat on Christmas morning gives dad two "value-losing" options. Either he's going to have to wear it out in public, upsetting himself as he is silently (if he's lucky) ridiculed by everyone who sees him, or he has to explain to his child, his own flesh and blood that he loves in ways he never imagined he would love anyone prior to having this new life born into his own, that he has terrible taste in gifts and would have been better off buying Dad a Wendy's value meal and pocketing the rest of the cash because no, no, I'm not going to wear this gaudy thing, not even long enough for your mother, who hasn't stopped laughing since you handed me the package, to snap a picture just so she can mock us both twenty years from now in front of your wife and my grandchildren.

You can imagine how well this will sit for Christmases in perpetuity. Speaking as someone who refuses to decorate the Christmas tree every year because my mom and grandmother got mad at me for putting too much tinsel on our tree in 1980, I can tell you those memories stick with you.

On top of all the tensions that Santa's Secret Shops bring to families every year and the economic losses it perpetuates, the school only raised $190 (which, sadly, was more than double what it raised last year). That means that if every teacher who worked it had paid $8 a day not to have to come into work 45 minutes early and stay 45 minutes late every day, they would have made more money.