Unintended consequences

Boy, we really gave those bankers a good drubbing! Many greedy captains of finance have given back their ill-gotten bonuses under threat of confiscatory 90% taxes. Many others have been fired. Doesn’t it feel great to be winning the class warfare battle?

Meanwhile, things are getting dicey in Providence (“RI gang mediators bracing for violence,” 4/4). Seems that the nonprofit Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence is facing a huge budget shortfall. Teny Gross, the institute’s executive director, says “Everyone is sending an apology. It feels a lot more desperate. There are VIPs of banks and investment places that used to donate… are now out of a job.”

Too bad we can’t learn from our mistakes. An attempt in 1990 to tax the luxuries of the evil rich resulted in “the loss of 330 jobs in jewelry manufacturing, 1,470 in the aircraft industry and 7,600 in the boating industry” (George Will, JWR Insight, Oct 28 1999), disproportionately devastating to little Rhodie. It was blue collar workers who suffered, not the rich.

Imagine that – the rich actually do something with their money – like spend it in the broader economy or make charitable donations. I always thought that they hunched over huge piles of cash in a darkened room hissing “Yessss, my precious…”

Politics abounds with unintended consequences. Sometimes the simplest solutions are best. It might do to tone down the class warfare rhetoric and allow the productive, entrepreneurial, and creative among us to make and spend their money. We would all benefit.