[Weiser Wonder]

To understand how people could be sucked into those horrible loans, you have to understand what happens when uneducated, stupid people are exposed to the dog-eat-dog business world with little regulation. Such a large portion of the American people have no idea what they are doing. They have no ability to see how bad of decisions they were making when there's a salesperson telling them how great it will be for them.

A relevant example of that today is for profit colleges in the United States. Right now, schools like University of Phoenix are preying on the stupid by making them sign up for huge loans to get bull #### degrees. They promise jobs that don't exist after graduation.

I spent time in my old home, Weiser, Idaho, this summer. A place where the graduating high school classes are only educated in the most basic of manner. Most can't read, write or do math at a high enough level to make it through a college curriculum. About 10% of any graduating class will get their degree from a legitimate university.

I talked to a lot of old classmates, a bunch of them were getting University of Phoenix degrees. One girl even told me she was getting 4 degrees from Phoenix. They had some recruiter come tell them about how they too could be educated and get great jobs like the smart kids they know, so they signed up. They'll come out in a couple years with degrees in Psych or Criminal Justice, 50K-100K in debt with no job prospects.

Do these people deserve blame for their bad decisions? Yes, they should have known better. Is touting personal responsibility while not doing anything about regulation going to solve the problem? No. It's basically a number's game, if regulation and education increase then the number of people falling for scams will decrease and vice versa.

The protesters aren't the people that received predatory loans. I'm willing to bet a large portion of the protesters are the young and educated. The real victims are the ones who aren't educated or informed enough to realize how much the deck is getting stacked against them.