Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage
of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality - a
loss of working class jobs, a rise in finance-driven speculative
capitalism, and a surge of tax policy decisions that benefit the
ultra-rich, among others. While these arguments focus on the macro
problems that contribute to growing inequality, they overlook one
innocuous but substantial contributor to the widening divide: the
explosion of fees accompanying virtually every transaction that
people make. As Devin Fergus shows in Land of the Fee, these
perfectly legal fees are buried deep within the verbose agreements
between vendors and consumers - agreements that few people fully
read or comprehend. The end effect, Fergus argues, is a massive
transfer of wealth from the many to the few: large banking
corporations, airlines, corporate hotel chains, and other entities
of vast wealth. Fergus traces the fee system from its origins in
the deregulatory wave of the late 1970s to the present, placing the
development within the larger context of escalating income
inequality. He organizes the book around four of the basics of
existence: housing, work, transportation, and schooling. In each
category, industry lobbyists successfully influenced legislatures
into transforming the law until surreptitious fees became the norm.
The average consumer is now subject to a dizzying array of charges
in areas like mortgage contracts, banking transactions, auto
insurance rates, college payments, and payday loans. The fees that
accompany these transactions are not subject to usury laws and have
effectively redistributed wealth from the lower and middle classes
to ultra-wealthy corporations and the individuals at their
pinnacles. By exposing this predatory and nearly invisible system
of fees, Land of the Fee will reshape our understanding of wealth
inequality in America.
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