Having watched the alacrity with which our public servants, (legislators and chief executive), recently handed away resources ascribed to the commonwealth of the citizenry at large and the difficulty those same servants had with reigning in health care costs in 2009, I’ve further refined my ideas about how our democracy works in 2011, and who the constituents of those public servants truly are. It should not surprise most of my readers that their constituency excludes 99% of Americans. I recently read this excellent article from Steve Randy Waldman which has sparked some thoughts of my own. In it, Waldman quotes John Kenneth Galbraith:
“To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times, people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always people who need more. Under the circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression, all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. The bezzle shrinks.”