“White collar crime” is crime.
Robbing someone at pen point is worse than doing it at gunpoint. You’re in a position of trust. You have a fiduciary responsibility. You are supposed to have ethics, before you have the law, to guide your actions.
Break all of that and it can be murder. People die when their wealth and future is stolen. White collar thieves steal college educations, they steal retirements, they steal food from the mouths of grandbabies. They make every honest businessperson suspect.
I thought everyone felt that way until I heard Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short and other light classics, interview Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes on his podcast Against the Rules.”
To hear Soltes tell us, white collar crime is a very recent invention. Those familiar with Charles Ponzi may disagree. The term itself didn’t come into the language until the 1960s and the “perp walk” now so beloved of victims wasn’t invented until the 80s, by Rudy Giuliani. (When does he get his, I wonder?)
On the podcast, Soltes and Lewis went out of their way to create sympathy for these criminals, especially Sam Bankman-Fried, the worst of them all. (Lewis is doing a book on him.)
Crypto was already a scam, but SBF and his crew scammed the scam. If blockchain ever had a legitimate business case (and I have my doubts), they destroyed it. They stole billions of dollars, largely from people who couldn’t afford it, and lived a life of waste in the Bahamas with it.
I want SBF burned.
It’s not enough that he has lost his job, and that his parents lost theirs. It’s not enough that he’s being disgraced and will be dragged through the courts. He deserves to rot in jail, dying so far in the future that young investors forget who he was, as teens today don’t know Sirhan Sirhan. The same with his whole crew, which has pled guilty but still faces sentencing.
The same goes with other atrocities. Maybe Silicon Valley Bank was just malfeasance. It’s still manslaughter. I know someone who dropped a toddler when he was 19. The kid died. He got 15 to life. It’s a tragedy, but jail is what you get when you cause a tragedy, even if you can reasonably call it an accident.
The same should apply here. We need more cops in the suites. We need more prosecutions, more convictions, and more people who were once masters of the universe doing what some call “black time,” not just “white time.” Real time. Lots of time.
It’s a perfectly good use of my tax dollars.
