Free Republic

Daren Palmer, the head of an Idaho firm known as the Trigon Group, has agreed to plead guilty to operating a $78 million Ponzi scheme that allegedly scammed fellow Mormons – including friends, neighbors and relatives – in a classic case of affinity fraud, The New York Times reported. According to government prosecutors, the Times said, Palmer raised more than $20 million by promising investors generous double-digit returns and then misappropriated their funds instead. He stands accused of swindling parents of children he coached in football, the newspaper said, and even his own father and brother-in-law along the way. He...

In a recent letter to the editor, the author of “The right vs. the law (5/26)” compared illegal immigrants to the early leaders of the church. He observed the early church members violated the law to practice polygamy and those men were still doing what was right, therefore there are cases when it isn’t wrong to break the law. This is all true. But then he implies by this same reasoning, illegal immigrants may not be doing something wrong. This is a false analogy, because the two situations are not the same in the relevant way. What made the church...