
What Happens When the Amish Get Rich - balbaugh
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-26/rich-amish-lured-into-florida-land-investment-scheme
======
baddox
The Amish are fascinating from so many different angles. Their history of
surprisingly successful legal clashes with the US government (no selective
service, no Social Security contributions, no education past 8th grade). Their
decentralized legal system, which despite being famously strict, is pacifist
and arguably anarchist. Their theology/philosophy, if you're into that. Their
local economies. Rumspringa. Meidung (shunning). And of course, their
extremely fast growth (estimated around 5% per year), which I've heard
attributed to "traditional birth rates and modern medicine."

~~~
rurounijones
It is certainly interesting from a "segregation" viewpoint.

If the Amish were immigrants arriving in American today they would (Warning:
generalization incoming) probably be demonized by a decent % of the population
for refusing to integrate into mainstream American society, the fact they
arrived a long time ago insulates them from that.

From reading about the selective service / social security bit it is almost
like they are not US citizens and their lands are not US lands. Weird
situation.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Much of the tolerance for the Amish has been able to happen because they
didn't pose any sort of threat to their neighbours or Americans in general.

With a combination of a high birth rate and a large amount of money, this may
change.

The Hutterites in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Montana form colonies similar to
those of the Amish. From an outsider's perspective, the major difference
between the Amish and the Hutterites is that the Hutterites embrace more
technologies that have a primary work purpose. They may not have cars, but
they do have trucks and million dollar combine harvesters.

The nature of their colonies makes the Hutterites very good at surviving and
thriving the boom and bust cycle of modern farming. They save up money during
boom years (like the past few years), and then buy up a large amount of land
and equipment during the bust years (excessive rain has already drowned a
large portion of this year's crop). The birth rate of the Hutterites means
that they're always expanding. Non-Hutterite farms are expanding too due to
the ever increasing cost and efficiency of farm machinery, but they're also
selling out to the Hutterites as sons and daughters move to the city.

Having a colony expand into your area can destroy a community. Hutterites are
good neighbours, but they are not part of the community. Your community school
may close due to poor attendance. Machinery dealers that have a good
reputation may thrive, but other businesses wither.

~~~
rmc
_Having a colony expand into your area can destroy a community. Hutterites are
good neighbours, but they are not part of the community_

 _the_ community? or _your_ community? Aren't they part of their own
community?

------
moron4hire
As soon as I saw, "owned the Super Fruit in Chambersburg", I knew who this
joker was. Man, I doubt this guy even sold the Super Fruit, I bet he went
bankrupt. That place was a dump. He probably only _told_ everyone he sold it
for a lot of money. And even if he did sell it, what he thinks is "a lot of
money" was probably only a few dozen kilobucks, maybe enough to live a year in
Chambersburg.

I grew up in Chambersburg and the surrounding area. I now live in DC and am
trying to get my parents to move _out_ of Chambersburg. It may be cheap to
live there, but there are other cheap places that aren't as awful. There is a
certain culture of two-faced, get-rich-quick scheming there. Every redneck and
his brother is trying to work an angle, trying to convince everyone they know
the score, they did the leg work, you should invest, when all they really did
was watch something on Discovery one night. This entire story is just not
terribly surprising.

See, the problem with the Amish isolating themselves so much is that it makes
them incredibly naive about the rest of us that they call "The English". They
think we're all awful people, that we praise Satan with our morning cereal.
You do anything that clearly demonstrates that as false, like... I don't
know... letting them see you be a normal person for more than 15 minutes, and
it breaks their brains. They don't know how to deal with it. So Moffitt
handing out free fruit probably short circuited everything they knew about
"The English" and they just lapped up his bullshit with a deer-in-the-
headlights-look. But if they weren't so cut off from their surrounding
community, they would have never paid attention to the guy.

Read up on their history. Their reason for coming to America, as well as a
bunch of other other Germanic religious groups around the same time, was
basically, "you know what? I may be a simple farmer, but I think our local
church is wrong and we should be a lot more strict about our religion. But
what's this? Most of the other people in our town don't want to be flogged for
not going to bed at 8pm? Religious persecution! Let's move to America!"

So they cut themselves off and didn't live in their geographic community. If
they were involved with The English, they would have known Moffitt was an
asshole. I've seen this script played out so many times IN THIS VERY TOWN.
It's probably the reason I haven't ever fallen for an MBA idea-guy's scheming,
I had plenty of practice listening to the bullshit streaming out of old guys'
mouths back home.

------
incompatible
Interesting story on the nature of trust. In this case it wasn't some random
guy turning up on the doorstep with a dodgy investment, but somebody they had
known and worked with for years. Is it the case that you can never absolutely
trust somebody, regardless of how long you've known them or what they've done
in the past?

~~~
emmelaich
The greater the perception of trust, the greater the payoff by betraying that
trust.

    
    
        "so-called affinity schemes, which rely on
        word of mouth within a tight community." 
    

Here's an Australian example -- Karl Suleman fleeced his Assyrian community in
Sydney in a Ponzi scheme.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froggy_(ISP)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froggy_\(ISP\))

------
cgtyoder
My dad grew up Amish and while I don't interact with them regularly, I do from
time to time. There are a few factors which contributed to their fleecing
here:

\- Inexperience of Amish in investing/no one to mentor their investing

\- “It's the lure of easy money, it's got a very strong appeal." No one is
immune here.

\- There is a very strong sense of conformity among the Amish - no one was
willing to recoup their investment if everyone else was staying in.

\- The Amish have a knee-jerk distrust of just about anything government-
related.

------
confluence
tldr; They get fleeced, just like everyone else.

A fool and his money are soon parted.

------
dtrizzle
My guess: 12 inch subwoofers and 26 inch rims.

~~~
liotier
> My guess: 12 inch subwoofers and 26 inch rims.

On the horsecart...

~~~
nnnnni
You joke, but I've seen a buggy with some pretty big audio equipment. I also
knew this Amish guy that had a Camaro.

Of course, it was during his Rumspringa...

------
gavanwoolery
TL;DR (Spoilers): Amish families were duped into investing into a Florida RV
park (which is still basically just vacant land), and lost $15-$20 million.
The man responsible, Tim Moffitt, has not yet been held accountable for his
crimes.

It sounds like there is a huge opportunity for real justice here - the
"records" say that $15-$20 million was almost all spent on the project, but
clearly it was not. That type of money does not disappear and must be
somewhere - perhaps in other houses/property that Tim bought.

~~~
ryanjshaw
With part of the moral, for me at least, being that while isolation (physical
and technological) may have its merits to those in the Amish community, it
makes it easier for them to fall for something like this. (Although why people
trust somebody with the gift of the gab handing out oranges and visiting RV
parks for 5 years is beyond me; I run a mile when I encounter people like
that.)

~~~
gavanwoolery
That's true, but I still believe the person should be held accountable for
fraud, regardless of how easy his targets were to dupe.

------
garrethv
I read through the first 5 pages, still didn't get what the article was going
on about. Who has time to read 10 pages worth of full-on wall text these days?
I came here for the comments to read the tldr version.

~~~
dodders
Serious question: Why do you click on HN links if you don't have the time to
read the article?

~~~
pepon
You seem obsessed with this issue, right?

Why do summaries and abstracts exist? Why people do TL;DR versions on Reddit?
Well, these things exist for the same reason that you visit links that you
don't have time to read.

By the way, how do you know if an article is 10 pages long or 10 words long
before actually visiting the link? If you visit an article because the title
sounds interesting and then you find out that it is 300 pages long, would you
read it? Or you would be crazy enough to read the TL;DR version?? But
remember, if you read the TL;DR version, keep it in secret, otherwise someone
will come and ask you why the heck you visit articles that you do not have
time to read.

