The Ripoff Internet service, especially in the U.S. which has inferior speed to many other countries, is a big rip off. You pay high prices for relatively slow internet speed and absolutely horrific customer service. They try to give you as many false charges as they can get away with if you aren't paying attention to your bill. They are happy to remove the charges after you spend on hour on the phone proving they are not correct, but they know many people won't have time time to get the charges removed, or might not be paying attention, so they do these illegal charges as a way to make some extra money from unsuspecting victims.

Moreover, once it is all set up, the only real expenses the company incurs are customer service expenses, which only exist because they charge too much and fail to provide adequate services. At most, internet service should cost $5 a month, or perhaps $5 per year, for gigabit internet, which would still bring the ISPs exorbitant profits. $100 per month for 100mbps internet is unreasonable.

The Ripoff Freemium apps are free apps that have paid in-game items. Whereas a paid app might cost $2 or maybe even $10 to $20 at most, a fremium app can quickly cost thousands if you don't pay attention. This is why parent should absolutely never let a child use their credit card for an iOS or Google Play account! That's a great way to go thousands of dollars into debt in just a few minutes.

Sure, developers might see it as a way to generate more revenue. However, they are missing the point that it is utterly a scam and entirely unethical, essentially robbery.

The Ripoff Music labels are one of the worst offenders in the world. They promise to make someone famous, and sometimes they achieve that. However, they imply that with the fame comes the riches as well. Instead, however, famous music artists rarely get a penny and go into debt for millions of dollars for money they never borrowed.

Essentially, the music labels leverage complex contracts to sign desperate, poor music artists (hereby the "victims"), and pay for all of the marketing costs to make the artist famous. Then, they collect royalties in the amount of many hundreds or thousands of times what they invested into the artist. What results is a famous artist who is not paid enough to even make rent.

Never buy a music CD! Buy the merchandise and go to concerts, it's the only way that the artists get paid. This is why many music artists are even giving away their music for free, because they never make a penny from it anyway, because all the revenue is stolen by their music label.

A prime example is 30 Seconds To Mars, one of the biggest rock bands in the world, who was sued by their music label for $30 million dollars; and this is on top of all the millions of dollars in royalties that were paid. It got so bad that Jared Leto, the lead singer of the band, left the label and became a free agent.

The Ripoff Everyone knows that insurance companies do not care about the common good, only about profits. Car insurance, and now health insurance, are now mandatory, even when you do not use them. If something is legally required that is never used, that person should be given a full refund at the end of the cycle in which the insurance was never used. Worse, even if a person gets into a car accident or has a health issue, the insurance company will move mountains just to stop from paying a penny to the dedicated policy holder.

The Ripoff Plastic surgeons, skin doctors, and other cosmetic medical doctors have a free reign to charge ridiculous costs to help people live a normal life. They routinely charge as much as $1,000 or even $50,000 per hour for cosmetic procedures, depending on the depth and scope.

Granted, for some procedures it is good to have prohibitive pricing to prevent people from having the procedure; but in practice this doesn't really work because people still find a way to pay for it. The point here though isn't so much the morality of the high prices, but that you really don't get what you pay for with most cosmetic medicine. Moreover, 1 out of 5 people (or more) end up worse off then they were in the first place for a procedure they couldn't even afford.

The Ripoff There is a joke, "how do you stop a lawyer from drowning in 1 inch of water?" The answer is to take your foot off their head. Lawyers are notorious, and have been notorious since the industry first began in the late 1800s. Lawyers exploit a demand created by the legal system which rewards those who have money and punishes those who are poor. Lawyers charge as much as $500 to $10,000 per hour or more.

Sure, they were to law school for a few years, but that doesn't give them a license to rip people off and exploit the poor. Well, actually, it does give them a legal license to do just that; it just doesn't give them the moral license to. A glorified paper pusher, lawyers should make no more than $30 per hour at the very most. Sadly, lawyers can charge whatever they want, and they do just that, charging exorbitant fees to exploit desperate victims of the broken judicial system.

The Ripoff Especially since the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the prices of food and drink have skyrocketed. When people stopped buying food, the food and drink industries resorted to more manipulative and deceptive practices by making larger packages with less food and more air inside to trick people who weren't paying attention.

The Ripoff Home prices in the entire country are outrageous, and mortgages are even more outrageous. The entire system is broken. There is no reason a two bedroom house should cost $100,000, much less $750,000 like in Southern California.

Renters are no better off. Spending the majority of their monthly income on rent is unreasonable, because most of rental properties have been paid off decades ago and are running on almost 100% profit. This is an outrageous exploitation of a basic human right, the right to have a place to live and call home.

This is worse in some parts of the country, most specifically Manhattan New York, where prices are as much as 500% or even 1,000% the normal price of rent in other areas of the country; and Southern California, where the cost of rent is 200% to 500% the cost anywhere else.

The Ripoff We wrote an entire post about the exorbitant cost of a college education in the U.S. here: The Great American US Higher Education Fraud and Swindle. The cost of a college education continues to go up, and the quality continues to decline. The cost of required books is outrageous, and the cost of tuition is even more outrageous. All this goes far above and beyond the real cost of education; most of it is just lining the pockets of a few of the executives at the top of the college food chain.

Worse, 9 out of 10 graduates end up without a job in this economy, and 7 out of 10 of the ones who do get a job end up working in a completely different field, like the food service industry. That certainly wasn't worth going $50,000 into debt for!

However, education itself isn't the problem. Education is great, and important. The cost is the problem. A college education should be free or near free. After all, as described in my other post, it really is already paid for! After you take away the millions going to paper pushers and thumb twiddlers like the university President and other useless overpaid executives.

The Ripoff Taxes are definitely the top of the list of things you don't get what you pay for. For most countries. In America, people are required to pay a minimum of 50% of their gross income in cumulative taxes. This includes Federal taxes, State taxes, Sales taxes, Property taxes, Medicare taxes, Electricity taxes, Travel taxes (planes, trains, and automobiles, including Gasoline taxes), Cell Phone taxes, "Sin" (or "vice") taxes (ammunition, firearms, soda, alcohol, cigarettes, and others); as well as many hidden taxes that are not called "taxes" but are actually taxes masquerading as penalties and fines, which includes parking tickets, traffic tickets, car and license registration, and many other taxes. Pretty much any time you pay a penalty or fix, this is essentially a tax.

Depending on the state you live in, this can be much greater. For example, California is one of the worst, taking as much as an extra 20% of your income in state taxes alone depending on your tax bracket. When you add up all the hidden taxes and taxes masquerading as fines, penalties, or interest, many Americans could pay as much as 90% or more of their total income in taxes!

And yes, the national debt is in the trillions, most of America's roads suffer, all the governments are corrupt, the police and the justice system fails to protect the innocent and fails to prosecute the guilty; housing, food, and commodities are unaffordable; the economy is in the gutter; jobs are at an all-time low; and the 1% in power are holding 99% of the total revenue of the entire country. Americans are definitely not getting what they are paying for in taxes!

The founding fathers of America started this country largely because of the tyranny of a government who had the freedom to unfairly tax its citizens without limit. However, today, Americans suffer from the same persecution, even facing similar penalties of being forced to give up their personal freedom and safety for failing or being unable to pay the exorbitant tax rate. The poor are hit the worst, many ending up in debt slavery or even prison just for being poor. It is truly a travesty.

Americans are not the only ones, however. My knowledge of foreign affairs is limited, but most countries in Asia and Europe suffer from similarly corrupt governments and exorbitantly high tax rates.