Free Bernie Madoff

I'm tired of all this piling on where Bernie Madoff is concerned.  I understand that there are those who are perhaps justifiably angry about his $50 billion Ponzi scheme, but a lot of the criticism has gone way over the top.  For example, he's been called a "sociopath," and among the reasons for this serious allegation is that he cheated his own sister out of $3 million, and she is now faced with the prospect of selling her Palm Beach house at a major loss.  I admit that this does not look good, on the surface.

Yet there is a pack mentality about the public outcry which I find personally unsettling.  Even the cable financial programs are joining in the lynch mob stuff, calling for Madoff's bail to be revoked, for the book to be thrown at him.

Is this really the time to be focused so intently on things which happened in the past?  Bernie Madoff did not kill anyone, at least not in a sense which any penal code actually defines as "murder."  Many, many rich people gave their money to Bernie in hopes of becoming even richer, in the expectation that because of their connections to this maven of Gilded Age Investment they could "outperform" the paltry returns of the ordinary market available to shlubs like, you know, you and me.  I'm not sure that's a compelling narrative; for my money, it lacks the essential elements of a long-running media scandal, unlike a disappearance of a Southern coed from a Caribbean Island.

But returning to the major point (and I'm heartened by the New York judge's ruling a moment ago that Bernie's bail will NOT be revoked and Bernie will be allowed to live in his $7 million penthouse while he awaits trial), anything that Madoff did, by definition (as suggested by my use of the past tense "did"), occurred before now, and our focus needs to be prospective, not retrospective.  

This sick, self-absorbed, self-indulgent obsession with things which have already happened ties up valuable intellectual and material resources which could otherwise be used in the serious battle to restore America's economic health, which, lying as it does in the future, has yet to occur.  Is anything likely to be recovered from Madoff?  No, of course not.  That $50 billion is gone, and we are simply throwing good money after bad in a futile attempt to "make an example" of Bernie Madoff, and the mood of the country, and more importantly, the mood of its political leaders, is impatient with such "nostalgic" indulgences as investigating crimes or "singling" people out for persecution.

So I think I would go beyond today's ruling allowing Bernie to remain free on bail.  I urge the dismissal of all charges against him.  In the largest sense, the problem is "self-contained;" only those who specifically represented that they could withstand a total loss of their capital were allowed this special opportunity to place their bets with Bernie in the first place.  The fact that, technically, there were no actual stocks, bonds or anything else in which they were investing does not materially change this crucial factor.  They said they could handle losing everything; they lost everything; and now they're all complaining.  

So the equities of the situation also favor an exoneration of Bernie.  It seems to me the investors are trying to change the rules of the game simply because they don't like the outcome, and the outcome, as I've pointed out, has already happened, which is a point on the space-time continuum where we simply can't afford to lavish our attention.