Morality?

Fifty billion dollars. That's $ 50,000,000,000. That's the alleged amount bilked from investors over the course of several decades in the Maynoff ponzi scheme. Several decades? We could probably blow that much in three months. All we'd have to do is try to occupy a previously secular nation and turn it into a breeding ground of fundamentalist terrorism. Heck if we throw in another country, filled CIA trained guerrillas hiding in caves deep within mountainous terrain then pit them against weekend warriors from Ohio who joined the US army to pay for dental school, then we could probably burn through the 50 x-large in two months. But as usual, I digress.

He is now being paraded about as the manifestation of everything that is wrong with the financial sector, capitalism, unregulated free markets, Park Avenue penthouses, wealth in general, etc.. This Bernie-guy even has a bloody yacht named Bull. We can't say he doesn't have a sharp sense of humor. Now he's going to be paraded through the streets as a nefarious thief who bankrupted charities and betrayed the trust of his community and peers. That is exactly what he is. A thief, a liar, and a crook. But, of course there's a but, he is no different from the rest of his kind, the super-rich. Balzac said that, "Behind every great fortune, there is a great crime." That's probably an exaggeration, because I'm sure most of the crimes were fairly pedestrian. Crimes, nonetheless, but they couldn't all have been great ones. Then of course there are fortunes built on things that may not have been illegal, but definitely immoral. Then again, wealth itself is immoral by nature which in turn lends itself easily to illegality.

Wealth is defined as the quality of profuse abundance. It just sounds obscene doesn't it? Profuse abundance. Quite the opposite of poor which would the the profuse abundance of nothing. Religions tend to cast a dim view of wealth. Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam all extol the virtues of living a simple life, respectful of authority and devoid of greed, avarice and attachment to material things. Sacrifice in this life in exchange for glory in the next. Who knew Ponzi was a theologian? Law, morality and religion put forth the principles by which we are all supposed to live by. But the "we all" is actually a euphemism for "you all." A select few operate outside of these stringent guidelines, they have done so since the beginning of organized societies and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

The key dichotomy is that financial inequality is inevitable and necessary. As a nation, we find ourselves in the midst of the worst financial situation since the Great Depression. However we are still fed, clothed, housed albeit in homes that are rapidly declining in value. If a homeless man collapses in Times Square, at the very least several cops and an ambulance will show up to take him to a hospital where he will be treated without hesitation. How many people are involved in this scenario? A dozen? Well there's the homeless man, the two police officers, the two emts, the police dispatcher, the emt dispatacher, the doctors and nurses in the ER, the factory workers that built the ambulance, the manufacturers of the medical equipment, the construction companies that built the hospital, the Department of Transportation that oversaw the paving of the roads that the ambulance drove on, the Department of Motor Vehicles that ensures other drivers know to make way for the sound of sirens, the siren producers, the audio engineers that design the sound the sirens make, etc. etc. etc. The network of humanity is irrevocably interconnected, but what does that have to do with financial inequality? Not everyone can be wealthy. The crux of economics is the idea of scarcity. Infinite wants, unlimited demand, must cope with very finite supply.

There is great clamor in the media about the explosive demand for Chinese consumption. The green fanatics are eager to point out that if everyone in China drove a car we'd probably all suffocate from Buick exhaust in the 30 seconds before the tidal waves from melted polar ice washed us all away. Hyperbole aside, the United States' rise to super power status was predicated upon its enormous economic capacity for production. WWII devastated Europe and we cranked out tanks, ships and planes to win that war and then retooled the factories to make cars, boats and jets to sell to our allies. Once they had enough stuff, we had to find new markets to peddle our wares, so we turned to Asia and South America. Problem is they learned how to make stuff to, so to make things a little fairer we buy their crap. The trouble nowadays is that there is just too much crap, unless we teach penguins how to get their Happy feet into a Chevy Malibu, the world is just over saturated with crap. Why is there so much crap? Because the only way to make money is to sell crap and lend money to other people to sell crap and then collect interest on the money so you can get a cut of the crap sales. Modern society is a massive pyramid scheme and we're running out of prospects who can pay for the Independent Distributor kit to get started climbing the ladder towards owning a Yacht named Bull full of supermodels and beer.

Morality is like the suggested admission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pay the full amount if you can afford it, or if you're a tourist. Morality keeps the majority of the population chugging along nicely so that the original pyramid builders can continue enjoying the view. Every now and then they throw one of their own down the pyramid into the sacrificial volcano so that the rest of the pyramid builders believe that the system they're building will one day they'll get them the same view.

As there's increasingly less to go around, the natives will get restless and they will cry out for blood. Just a couple of days ago on the cover of the NY Post there was an "expose" on the excessive spending of a CEO's wife. $ 53,000 a week she spends on her lavish lifestyle. Why is it that her spending is a slap in the face to everyone suffering during the recession yet we still tune in heartily to MTV Cribs and celebrate the 28" rims and diamond grills? There is a brewing class war in the United States and perhaps around the world. Luckily these days the have-nots are more inclined to raise taxes and file class action lawsuits than to raise arms and file the ends of their shotguns. Because in the end they want to have someone polish the deck on their yacht.