Brother to the late squalid Imbosser Now, there's an intriguing phrase!
the clipping of coins ...And today we have our insurance scammers, etc. I wonder if we (the human race) will ever outgrow the "I'll just take more for myself" mindset... This reminds me of something I heard a few weeks ago, on NPR I think. They had somebody on there who was giving an elementary lesson in economics. He used the illustration of a very small village with a very large village green. Every farmer had a few cows that they all put to graze on the green. They had reached an agreement not to graze the cattle on Sundays, so as to let the grass revitalize. But one farmer started putting his cows out there on Sundays, causing his cattle to be bigger and thus more valuable than the other farmers' cows, while at the same time depleting the supply that was available to the rest of them. I remember thinking that however unlikely this particular scenario was, how very common that type of behavior is. More synchronicity: I just got a PM where the sender wrote, on an unrelated topic: society has to reach some concept of best common interest