Looking for a scapegoat?
March 18, 2009 (Wednesday)
The country is up in arms over the millions of dollars paid in bonuses to Wall Street executives. The people are angry because billions of tax dollars have been paid to the companies involved.
The really big money, however, is not in the bonuses but in the bailout funds. AIG, for example, has received payments more than a thousand times the amount of the bonuses (173 billion vs 165 million).
Well, I’m not going to get into the merits of the “bailout” plan, or the bonuses, but it seems strange that a struggling, failing company would see its present bonus policy as justifiable, in light of the circumstances.
When times get hard, we always seem to migrate toward the hunt for scapegoats. We feel overwhelmed by the adverse circumstances we face, so we look for someone to blame. If we can find a person or group of persons to accuse of something, we tend to do it. Most of the time the real problems that have us frustrated are much larger than the person, persons, or organizations we are accusing. yet we persist with our blame game. The pages of history are littered with persecutions, lynchings, assaults, ostracism, gossip campaigns, etc. etc. against our scapegoats.
I’ll say it again: the nature of our economic system is that is cyclical. It has its good times and its bad times. That’s its nature. It’s just the way it works. The big mistake we have made in recent years was to invite the fox into the henhouse, thinking he would do no harm if we just let him do whatever he wanted. We are gradually learning again the lesson that humans are capable of great evil as well as great good. We need free enterprise, but we also need to sleep with one eye open, because the office worker taking home company pencils is not the only dishonest person around. The bosses need watching, too.
The child in me wants to pout about my losses, and the parent in me wants to scold and punish those whose greed has caused pain, but I need to let the adult in me assess the situation, make necessary changes and forge ahead.