FEIN: Biden and Palin betrayed ignorance

By Bruce Fein | Tuesday, October 7, 2008

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COMMENTARY:

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be," admonished Thomas Jefferson.

The United States has neglected that admonition. Ignorance has reached a high-water mark; and, freedom is diminishing daily by unchecked, lawless, bloated and secret government.

Dispositive proof of the nation's ignorance was last Thursday's vice presidential candidate debate. The questions were inane. The answers were insipid. The causes and cures for the current economic travails expounded by the vice presidential nominees were exemplary of a suboptimal store of wisdom.

Sen. Joe Biden, Delaware Democrat, and Republican Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, respectively, concurred that Wall Street avarice had occasioned the nation's economic ills. Mr. Biden reiterated three times that "letting Wall Street run wild" was the cause. He expected credulity by hinting at Lewis Carroll's precedent in "The Hunting of the Snark": "I have said it thrice: What I say three times is true." Mrs. Palin bettered the instruction of Mr. Biden. She bewailed four times that "greed and corruption on Wall Street" had given birth to the nation's financial crunch. The Republican vice presidential nominee likened Wall Street's monetary sinning to the Holocaust by sermonizing: "Never again."

The Biden-Palin diagnosis mistook religion for economics - first cousin to preferring the religiously celebrated geocentric to the scientifically documented heliocentric theory of the universe. In Exodus 32, God curses worshippers of the Golden Calf for having "corrupted themselves," and promises to inflict condign punishment. In Matthew 20, Jesus preaches, "That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. ... It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Those guilty of the cardinal sin of avarice are consigned to the fourth level of hell in Dante's "Divine Comedy," "Inferno."

Thunderbolts and the threat of eternal perdition from God have not diminished greed. The Biden-Palin execrations of Wall Street substantiate the durability of the vice. The rival nominees implausibly promised to cure Wall Street avarice, which would require super-godly power smacking of hubris or blasphemy. But the two were clueless as to how this would be accomplished.

Neither urged that avarice should be made criminal and prosecuted as a felony. (In any event, the United States Supreme Court held that the Constitution prohibits making an addiction to money or sister vices a crime in Robinson v. California (1962)). Neither suggested taxing greed to diminish the quantity. Neither even attempted to define greed to give fair warning of what would be proscribed - a core requirement of due process and the rule of law.

The definitional task is unachievable. Greed, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Shakespeare's King Lear lectured, "O reason, not the need! Our basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous." Is greed craving more than $100, a $1,000 or $1 million beyond the bare necessities? Can a demarcation line between St. Francis of Assisi and Marie Antoinette be articulated?

Even if greed could be reasonably defined and deterred, the desire for money or its equivalent is the engine, not the enemy, of economic prosperity. Scottish moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith, a lodestar for the Founding Fathers, warned that, "Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience." He recognized the happy convergence of private and public economic interests (but for price fixing or monopolies) in free markets where private gain is commensurate with satisfying the desires of others expressed by their willingness to pay.

Smith elaborated: "[E]very individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, not knows how much he is promoting it. ... [H]e intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society. ... I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

The Biden-Palin salute to virtue and war against greed as the answer to the current economic downturn would protract the recovery time by multiplying government obstructions of Smith's "invisible hand." Healthy, dynamic, nonstatic economies are earmarked by both bankruptcies and new business starts coupled with the constant migration of labor from dwindling to growing industries or professions. Experience has proven that trial and error by producers or sellers in free markets is the best method for maximizing consumer welfare. The contrary creed celebrated in the Biden-Palin theology of economics shows ignorance comes at a steep price.

Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer at Bruce Fein & Associates, Inc., and author of "Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for our Constitution and Democracy" (Palgrave Macmillan).

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