Crime and Punishment: Bonus Time!

Anger at injustice is a fundamental ingredient of civilization and probably of human society generally. It likely predates law and is a primary motivator for it. The manifest injustice of paying huge bonuses to the very people with proximate responsibility for bringing down the international financial system in general, and AIG in particular, has stirred a storm that threatens to capsize Obama's economic plan. At the same time, I can't quite escape the suspicion that the whole bonuses dustup is a smokescreen to distract us from the larger scale injustice of who winds up with the big bucks that the US pumped into AIG - Goldman Sachs, et. al., their primary co-conspirators. Maybe the whole deal was to pump up the bonuses scandal, publically sacrifice the AIG employees in question, and hope nobody notices about the other 170 billion dollars.


The sight of Bernanke and others publically wringing their hands about the injustice of handing over taxpayer bucks to the undeserving and extortionate rich seems both phony and cringing - it seems that we had to hand over Czechoslovakia because otherwise that Mr. Hitler would do bad things. As it happened, Munich both facilitated and encouraged all the terrible things Hitler did subsequently do. Will our genuflecting before the big banks turn out differently?

The Roman judicial system supposedly had a motto: "let justice be done though the heavens fall." Sometimes, at least, the more serious celestial threat is failing to ensure that justice is done.

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