LOSE MONEY NOW! ASK ME HOW!

I saw it in his eyes. “If I hit this guy,” he was thinking, “… if I hit this guy, there’s going to be a headline, HERBALIFE DISTRIBUTOR ASSAULTS JOB APPLICANT!”But I’m getting ahead of myself.It was the mid-1980s and I was broke. I mean really broke. Counting my pennies broke. One of the ways you know you have a vocation to the theater is you can’t hold down a day job, and I had a really strong vocation to the theater. And a really strong aversion to working a regular job.  But starvation motivates, so I did what I dreaded. “If I can’t get a job in theater,” I said to myself, “I’ll get a regular job outside of it.”The first interview of the day was for a sales position, although the ad was rather vague on exactly what the successful candidate would be selling. But, naïve young man that I was, I put on my suit and headed out to West St. Louis County for the interview, in the maze of office parks and happy hour bars. The interviewer greeted me warmly and said, “Before I ask you questions, I have a video for you to see!”The video was a thirty minute infomercial on this fabulous product that if I were lucky I just might be given the opportunity to sell. It was still not clear what the product was. Much of the video was shot at a giant convention with thousands of people cheering, and speakers giving testimony to the fabulous wealth the product was earning them. It all had the look of some religious cult. I distinctly recall one speaker telling the crowd about his mansion, his boats, his cars, his unbelievable income – all thanks to this wonderful and beneficent product. He threw his arms open. “I AM A PRODUCT OF THE PRODUCT!” he proudly proclaimed, to a throng of the cheers of thousands.“I am a product of the product?” I thought. This is rank idolatry. I knew this even though I was not a Christian at that point. I knew that such a statement was both a kind of apotheosis of a man-made thing and also a ridiculous indignity to the man who said it.  How can a man be a product of something far less noble and powerful than he is? Why would any man want to be?But, aside from this, what on earth was the mysterious product? What was this great giver of wealth and prosperity? What was this panacea, this Meaning of Life, this savior of the poor and downtrodden, this great creation that lifted up losers like me and gave them solid prosperity part-time and limitless prosperity full-time?Hints were beginning to be dropped. By using this product you could, “Lose weight, gain weight, or stay the same.” Well, that pretty much covers the bases, I thought. The product helped you feel better. It not only made you money, but it healed you as well.  It brought wealth and health, and of course utter and total contentment. “I wish I could bottle that,” I thought, “but apparently someone already has.”I was getting a bit concerned. I had allotted thirty minutes for this interview, and had another interview at the top of the hour at the next industrial park down the street. If I could find it in this maze. But the video showed no sign of ending.And then the truth came out- HERBALIFE! That’s right, Herablife, your guide to health, wealth and happiness through MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING.I got up to go. “Thank you, but I have another appointment and I need to leave,” I said to the interviewer. He blocked my way out the door. Literally stood between me and the exit.“You can’t be serious,” he said. “You mean you only budgeted thirty minutes for this interview? That’s foolish. Do you realize what an opportunity you’re passing up?”“Well, I know a scam when I see it,” I replied, and I stepped past him into the hall. The air-conditioned, office park, muzak-playing hall.He followed me. “Hey!” he shouted. “What did you say?”I turned to him. “You heard me,” I said.He came up and stood in my face.  His eyes narrowed.  He put his hands on his hips, his jacket ruffled, his tie dangling. He stared at me. I stared back at him. I could see that he wanted to punch me.But the thought of tomorrow morning’s headline flashed before his eyes, and he backed down. I turned to go.Fast forward to 2010, twenty-five years later. My wife Karen tells me that her nephew, who lives in Florida where the housing bubble has burst so badly that doctors and lawyers are in foreclosure, where the whole geography is flat and the businesses and churches all look like modern office parks, where the steamy swamps were paved over for shopping malls that are now empty … that her nephew in Florida wants her to watch a video online. He answered an ad on a telephone pole. “Lose weight now! Ask me how!” And there’s a little video he’d really like her to see.I was furious. “There’s no way you’re watching that thing!” But she watched it, and to her credit, she was very blunt with him. “You want a get-rich-quick scheme,” she said to him. “You want the easy way and there is no easy way. If you want to start your own business, it’s not what Herbalife makes it out to be. It will be like Theater of the Word or Upstage Productions, our two businesses. You’ll be working sixty or more hours a week, you’ll put in more time and effort than you thought possible, and if you’re lucky you’ll just barely make enough money to live on.”And even while I was praying to God thanking him for a wife with such common sense, it struck me that Herbalife, after all these years, is still what it was back then–a microcosm of the American economy.In the Herablife model, the product, though praised as a mini deity, really doesn’t matter. Nobody cares about the product.  Everybody recognizes that it’s no more than snake oil with modern labeling. That’s because the material product, the herbal supplement that is the thing being bought and sold, is beside the point. The point is finding suckers in your “down line”, finding people like you eager to be taken in and willing to buy and sell to others something that has no value in and of itself. That’s the real “product”, not the bottle of herbs and vitamins, but the devotion to the idea that wealth can be produced out of thin air.In my last article I wrote on Hilaire Belloc’s fantastic book Economics for Helen, and I pointed out how Belloc always stayed focused on definitions. Belloc is very clear about what economic wealth is, it is a natural resource upon which human effort and capital has been applied, creating something to be consumed which is valuable to man. By possessing such a thing, a thing for which others are willing to trade, you are possessing wealth. With this definition in mind, Belloc contrasts usury, the taking of interest on a loan that produces no wealth, or in his words, “It [usury] is a claim for an increase of wealth which is not really present at all.”Herbalife and similar multi-level marketing scams are usury as applied to sales and distribution. Herbalife is based on the great lie that money can be made where no wealth is created. The underlying material product in Herbalife is, economically speaking, practically worthless. But built on top of this lack of value is a thirty year old corporation that has been selling the sizzle from the beginning, a company whose only customers are, in effect, its own sales force.And how different is this from our runaway and now rundown economy? Speculation and sales have their place in economic activity, but when speculators invest in derivatives of worthless instruments of debt, and when salesmen sell excitement over a product whose value is outrageously inflated, then we get further and further from what Belloc would tell us economic activity is all about–the creation of things of value, the production of actual wealth, and the profit that comes from producing, transporting and marketing this wealth. Profit that comes from the creation of no wealth is unjust profit, a get rich quick scheme, a bubble that is sure to burst.It is the mentality of usury. It is the economics of usury. It is all film flam, and it needs to stop.