I plan to include some actual explanations at some point. Until then, you'll have to do your own research. :) Helpful, huh?
Here, when I refer to a scam, I don't mean somebody calling you up on the phone, convincing you to invest in a llama farm, and making off with your money in an explicitly fraudulent way. That's a different kind of scam from the kind in which I'm interested here. What I'm talking about is a situation where somebody's making off with your money, and you gave it to him willingly because you thought you had to. It generally involves industries that are dominated by anti-competitive corporations that cut deals with government officials, but it can also involves such corporations working to make your acceptance of their standards and prices an unquestioned element of the status quo.
I don't think these scams should be dealt with by increasing government regulation. Quite the opposite: I think we should make it a priority to elect government officials who will not make anti-competitive deals with private industry. And then we should just let the free market be.
I probably should include some government scams in here too, as long as I'm on this Libertarian rant. Social Security is a scam (it's a Ponzi scheme, to be precise).
Many of today's middle-class weddings resemble royal affairs, with price tags in the tens of thousands of dollars. People take out loans to finance their weddings. Granted, any occasion where you choose to host everyone you know is going to be more expensive than your average beer blast. But many people seem to feel that they must bow to Tradition by buying expensive clothes, making the bridal party buy expensive clothes, providing expensive food, exchanging diamond wedding bands, and so forth. If Tradition is important to you, though, take a look at how far back it goes -- around the middle of the twentieth century or so. As I understand it, before that, people traditionally got married in the best clothes they already had. They didn't insist upon a uniformed, monochrome entourage. They exchanged some tokens of love -- maybe rings (garnet is apparently the traditional wedding ring stone) or maybe something else.
The main idea in wedding planning is do what you want
, which is actually the very thing you'll hear from wedding industry "experts" right before they tell you about a great deal on a $2000 bridal gown. ;) Don't shop in bridal boutiques. If you have a wedding party, don't insist that they do so.