The Gallows are Empty

“O, sir, to willful men/the injuries that they themselves procure/must be their schoolmasters.” William Shakespeare, King Lear

The Masters of the Universe peddled dreams to dreamers. They told the gullible that reward would come without work, that dross could become gold with no more than a brief incantation and the flick of a magic wand. The gullible wanted to believe it was so. The game was rigged all along, but only the masters and their minions knew the extent of the ruse. “Don’t worry, the masters said. “The old verities of work and reward are no more. This is the new economy. Trust us.”

And now the dream has been unmasked for a fraud, the benevolent Market God exposed as a charlatan; instead of gold, the streets outside the money palaces are paved with cracked bones, and the stench of broken lives sullies the air. Despite the wreckage and the carnage, the pain and the suffering that lay at their feet, the Masters are untouchable; the stocks that should hold them fast are empty, and none of them will ever mount the gallows.

Regulators were present but rendered powerless by a belief that the Market would reward the virtuous and punish the incompetent. Another falsehood. The virtuous were ignored and the incompetent followed with slavish devotion by people intelligent enough to know better. Virtue and ethics were an old school notion, the last refuge of overly cautious souls out of touch with the new order. This too proved false. Wisdom born of experience and bedrock values never goes out of style because while the world has changed, humankind has not.

Old lessons must be re-learned every generation or so. One cannot stand before an empty fireplace and expect it to give heat; one must first go to the woodpile and swing an axe, break a sweat splitting logs, and then haul those logs to the fireplace. Reward follows work, not the other way around. It takes effort to build an edifice that will survive good times and bad times, war and famine, disease and drought and deluge, not to mention the caprice of politics.

There is no free lunch, in other words, and precious few shortcuts. When a man or woman promises something valuable for what seems like nothing, one is wise to withhold one’s trust long enough to defy the old adage that a sucker is born every minute.