Hilarious. Sounds legal and I doubt they would have done it otherwise. Good example of why most regulation is ridiculous because it's generally easy to find and exploit loopholes.
I identify as a libertarian... But all these folks blaming the government in this case without truly knowing what took place but just jumping to the regulations are to blame conclusion, make me ill.
Yes the law of unintended consequences often occurs with regulations however blatantly taking advantage of someone or something is wrong, legal or illegal. This is where we need a jury of peers to determine whether we want to encourage or discourage the behavior that this company took part in. I'd find this company guilty in a heart beat.
It's like jury nullification in reverse.
All it takes for evil to triumph is good men to do nothing.
The law of unintended consequences may well apply to such "jury nullification in reverse", by creating jurisprudence. This partcular case seems like very clear-cut fraud to my layman's mind, though.
I'm a libertarian at heart but I have no time for shenanigans of this kind. I want efficient regulations, not an absence of regulation; and streamlined regulations can only work where you have a regulator with sufficient discretion to enforce the spirit of the regulation rather than allowing people to take refuge in pedantic legalism (thus generating more and more regulation to deal with all the potential corner cases).
