I've noticed a little divide creeping up between American and British/European bankers in newspapers recently. Europeans are starting to mock the Wall Street dilemma in America. The article below from the London paper The Evening Standard compares British and American bankers wives and decides American bankers' wives are much greedier.
I read the bit about the anonymous Goldman Sachs' wife (below) with interest. Lisa, one of our faithful readers is a Goldman's wife. Could this be about her?
"Over the weekend Lehman Brothers was desperately trying to recruit 50 counsellors. On a scale of difficult things to take in, going from being a high-flying banker to a nobody in the space of a day is right up there on top of the stress chart, and it's no easier for their spouses.
One minute, bankers' wives were ordering curtains from Nina Campbell and the next they were wondering whether they could keep their home. Bankers don't tend to get anyone's sympathy but the higher the perch you fall from, the more the landing hurts.
The experience of loss, confusion and panic that bankers and their wives are feeling now will be different depending on whether they are American or British. The latter I think will fare better. The truth is that American banks set the bar but the British and Europeans never really wanted to jump.
It's not because they aren't smart or hard-working enough. It's because they are too well brought up to buy into the brutal Wall Street culture that says manners and morals don't count. Americans think life is work: the rest of the world knows better.
...
Susie Rogers of Beauty Works West told me one client, a Goldman Sachs wife, said this week that she wouldn't buy a new handbag or great new dress this season but she'll be damned if she has to go without her weekly manicure and pedicure.
“British women seem to be able to take it or leave it but it's different for Americans.”
Nannies at £35,000 a year, gardeners at £50 an hour, monthly highlights and haircut at £200 a go and hundreds of pounds spent on eating out were the staple expenses of the banker's household. Along with the mortgage, these usually eat up all the income.
Still, there is consolation in Marcel Proust's words: “We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire but gradually our desires change.”"
29 comments:
Oh yes, that's me. It's much more glamorous that I didn't mention my real life, which includes stomping about with my (well-pedicured) feet in wellies covered with chicken poo.
I like the Proust quote; it sounds like he'd discovered the economic principle of adaptive preferences far before the modern economists did.
You know I'll have to go wiki 'adaptive preferences' now. I didn't learn that in Economics class. I only had Econ 101 anyway.
I looked up 'adaptive preferences' but I can't understand the explanation. Either you'll have to explain it with a Comment or I'll have to ask Mel when I see him later.
E, you probably wouldn't have studied adaptive preferences in Econ 101. It's more of a concept from social welfare theory and those economics.
Trying to be brief, it's the idea that (usually powerless or poor) people begin to value what they actually have, instead of "better" things that are out there. The thinking is that the better things are so unattainable that rather than to value things they can never have, the console themselves by valuing what they do have.
It's been likened to "sour grapes" but it is slightly different in that the persons in question really do come to prefer what they have, not just pretend to prefer it (this can sound rosy, but it is usually to their general detriment) instead of other things that they would normally value more. So it's sort of a plight of hopelessness.
So hopefully now you can see how that Proust quote reminded me of that...
I think that is how a lot of people keep going, too. You figure out sooner or later that you aren't going to be a Pulitzer-prize winning author or have a hit record or bag a millionaire partner, etc., so you have to change the way you view those things or else become a bitter twisted person. It's part of maturity to let go of unattainable goals, I think, and to become more realistic. Life's so short and you want to be happy if you can.
I think I would say that there is a middle ground where you can acknowledge that maybe you're not going join the peace corps and save the world, but that there other things in life that bring you satisfaction, or other ways to help people. You don't have to now claim that going into the peace corps and helping people is a load of crap, and that your job of being a cashier is actually the pinnacle of helping people.
I completely agree that it is part of maturity to let go of unattainable goals - what I don't agree with is that you stop valuing your previous goals in order to tell yourself that the life you ended up with is *better* than the life you wanted when you were younger. That's the crux of the adaptive preferences, you no longer value your former goals, ONLY because you didn't attain them.
Of course there are actual situations where one's preferences just change, and it's not this quasi-sour-grapes thing. I used to (horrors!) think Cher had the most beautiful clothes in the world when I was about six.
You'll be comforted to know that I have since changed my mind about this, and it has nothing to do with my not owning a bunch of Bob Mackie.
Social welfare theory huh? Goodness! Bankers? Good Golly!
Here are some researchers from the World Bank considering social welfare: "If society is on average averse to poverty, then the optimal income tax schedule displays negative marginal tax rates, at least for less skilled individuals. Negative marginal tax rates play the role of a Pigouvian earnings subsidy, fostering the supply of poor individuals to provide labor."
I can't follow the math used in this paper but I get this part of it- giving people who don't pay income taxes a tax rebate keeps an available pool of cheap labor around. How clever. Especially considering this is exactly what we do in the US. It doesn't actually do anything to remove the "aggregate negative externality" caused by the unpleasant sight of poor people or the crimes they commit, however.
I was a little disconcerted by Lisa's adaptive preference comments, by the idea that contentment is usually to one's harm. Lisa seems like a nice person so maybe she's just relaying the theory here. This is the first I've heard of adaptive preference so I decided I'd look it up and got sidetracked by this summation of a paper by Ann Levy in 'Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy':
"I argue that a gendered division of labor is often the result of choices by women that count as fully voluntary because they are an expression of preferences and commitments that reflect women's understanding of their own good. Since liberalism has a commitment to respecting fully voluntary choices, it has a commitment to respecting these gendered choices. I suggest that justified political action may require that we fail to respect some people's considered choices."
This is what kills me about social planners and liberal respecters of voluntarism: if it doesn't fit their idea of how things should be, why then they should be able to force their view on others through policy.
Not wishing to offend any liberal sensibilities, but what liberal advocates the use of force on others? Because when it comes down to it, social planning through tax policy or "justified political action" requiring failure to respect some people's choices comes in the end to men with guns demanding certain behaviors under threat of fine, jail, or in case of resistance, potential death. Isn't the root meaning of liberal to do freely?
That World Bank Research paper above says: "Let us first consider a first-best world in which the government knows who is of what ability. The agents do not have the possibility to mimick other lower ability agents and the government can directly impose consumption-labor bundles that are contingent on the individuals' productivity."
(I'm gonna persist on studying this thing until I do understand the math) The World Bank considers the best possible world one in which government decides who works at what job and what that person consumes. I wonder if that includes dispossessed banker's wives.
The second paper recommends that even personal choices be determined by government becasue some women's understanding of what is good for them is inadequate. I wonder if this also includes dispossessed banker's wives.
How many lives did this sort of authoritarian socialist philosophy destroy in the last century? Somewhat over 200 million people starved, burned, shot, suffocated, and worked to death for their own good and the good of the state. This kind of thinking has shown time and again that it practices no restraint upon itself.
An irony I find in these musings is that I have a cheerful, fruitful, occasional correspondence with some black Marxists in Washington D.C. who publish one of the best websites for blacks in the US. It is ironic that I, a constitutionalist white man from Mississippi have such a rapport with these "fellow travelers" in Washington that they never fail to wish me "faith in the struggle". It is ironic as well that these Marxists speak more like the founding fathers of Amercia than present day Republicans do. It is ironic that these black Marxists view Obama as a fascist puppet of Wall St. while the world worships him and eagerly anticpates his hope and change; American liberals applaud his Marxist sounding policies because Marxism is a beautiful idea, and they ignore the fact that his campaign received five times the money from Wall St. his national socialist rival received- fascism stands on two legs after all, socialism and capitalism.
Has the world turned upside down?
All these various problems with money and dividing the wealth, the confusion of finance capitalism with a true free market when it belongs more properly square in the socialist camp have their root in two things: fiat money and fractional reserve banking.
The evils of finance capitalism and unequal distribution of wealth would not exist in a system of comoodity money and interest free credit. People would keep all of their own wealth and money would serve society instead of society serving money. No one man would be able to make billions of dollars because no one man is worth billions of dollars. People would once again become owners instead of debtors.
Good manners, morals, and all I would like to remind the Evening Standard that it was the Bank of England that brought this curse of central banking to the US. And don't pretend England and Europe didn't eagerly buy into the whole subprime mortgage scheme when for 15 years persons of sound mind have been warning against it. English bankers less greedy? Hardly.
Lisa said: That's the crux of the adaptive preferences, you no longer value your former goals, ONLY because you didn't attain them.
E again: I'd forgotten about this post until Marty commented on it. Lisa, the adaptive preferences stuff is v. interesting. I'm examining myself now and thinking that I do exactly that -- I poo-poo goals I once had simply because I haven't attained them. Whoa -- what a realization & something for me to ponder. thanks.
You *should* be disconcerted if someone says that contentment is usually to one's harm. However, I did not say nor imply this; I don't know how you got to this from what I wrote.
Hello Lisa :)
I took the meaning from this part of your statement:
"It's been likened to "sour grapes" but it is slightly different in that the persons in question really do come to prefer what they have, not just pretend to prefer it (this can sound rosy, but it is usually to their general detriment) instead of other things that they would normally value more."
To me valuing what one has means being content. It is highly probable that I am missing something here because of my dislike for social planning and social welfare planning theorists, at least insofar as I am familiar with them. To me they tend to take a very material view of the world and to impose their own material values on others. Further they seem to be so convinced in their own superiority they believe it is just for them to plan out the lives of others.
Marty, when you say "commodity money", are you referring to something like the gold standard or going even further and advocating a system close to barter?
It seems to me that when we used the gold standard, income distribution was no less skewed. Granted, there were no billionaires, but surely the owners of the Newport mansions must have been the 19th century equivalent?
Hi Marty,
Ah yes, what I said was that someone can prefer something that is to his or her detriment.
This seems to me to be something very different than saying that contentment is usually to one's harm.
You seem to have morphed my concept of preferences into "contentment" along the way, with which I definitely do not agree, and you have also attributed "usually [to one's harm]" to me, which I didn't say, because I didn't mean "usually".
I just wanted it to be clear that the formulation in your comment was your conception and not mine.
Hi Lisa, I did do some morphing there, clarity noted.
Mel, by commodity money I do mean something like gold. The system that successfully kept the price of goods and services level from 1635 until 1913 was based on silver, specifically the Spanish dollar. The greatest period of American propserity did employ the use of fiat money as well, what was called Colonial Scrip. The colonies were so prosperous just prior to the Revolutionary War Ben Franklin was called before Parliament to explain how the Colonies had achieved this as England at the time had high unemployment and high taxes and high crime. Franklin explained the Colonies were issuing their own paper money at no interest and controlling the amount of it so it matched the needs of the market. The Bank of England took exception of this and convinced the King to outlaw this practice so the King decreed the Colonies had to use the King's money at interest (really the Bank of England's money since the King was always in debt). Within one year the Colonies were in the same financial state as England, high unemployment and high crime. Franklin said the forced use of the King's money was the primary cause of the Revolutionary War, not the small taxes they would have gladly paid.
During the Revolutionary War the Colonies started issuing paper money again to meet war needs and issued too much, creating run away inflation. So once the war was done they decided they wouldn't use paper money any more as the temptation to make too much of it was so hard to resist and had such disastrous effects on the economy. So in the Constitution they put "no state shall issue anything but gold and silver coins as currency". They went around collecting samples of the coin most popularly in use, the Spanish dollar, did a statistical analysis, and in the Coinage Act of 1793 defined the term "dollar" just so there would be no mistake. A dollar is just 371.25 grains of fine silver; the equivalent weight of gold was valued at 15 dollars, then later changed to 20 dollars because silver was so plentiful in the US.
After the Civil War the central bankers in England sponsored a bill through direct bribes to US congressmen to have silver demonetized, creating the "gold standard". Gold, being more scarce, was easier to obtain a monopoly over.
In 1913 our central bank, the third one we created, was formed. This bank, the Federal Reserve, began issuing paper currency along with the Treasury's gold- from 1913 to 1925 the inflation rate was 98%.
In 1931 FDR directed ordered all gold to be turned in to the nearest Federal Reserve Bank under threat of heavy fines and prison sentences. Now the Federal Reserve Bank had possession of all the money with any real value and still to this day holds certificates for this gold. It's valuation is set at 42 dollars an ounce though the market price is now about $950.
In 1971 Nixon announced the US would no longer pay any debts in gold, and since that time US debt, which is our greatest export, has skyrocketed. Our economy, like Britain's, can only expand through the creation of more debt. The graph of the moeny supply follows very closely the graph of the national debt.
The reason the creators of the Constitution wanted to use gold and silver as money is because they have a stable value. One ounce of gold is always worth one ounce of gold. This method places an engineering control on the creation of inflation, which is merely a way to transfer wealth from borrowers to lenders.
You are correct, even in the days of the gold standard there were millionaires and maybe even some billionaires. That is because of the practice of fractional reserve banking which allows the banks to issue $111 of credit for every dollar deposited into the system.
You loan the bank one dollar, the bank is allowed to loan out nine. The nine dollars is redeposited in some bank, and that bank is allowed to loan out eight dollars and ten cents, and so on and so forth until all the cycles are completed. The system is thus allowed to collect interest on $111 while paying you interest on $1. Seem fair to you? I've read that England is even worse, allowing up to $19 for every $1. This is how the present world crisis was created. The bank owners aren't worried though, they are okay and when the shakeout is over they will go back to making money with their keyboards, which they will use to buy up real assets at fire sale prices following the collapse.
William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England, in "A Brief Account of the Intended Bank of England": "The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing." See why the King went into business with him?
The solution to the problem is an end to fiat currency and the abolition of fractional reserve banking.
Say, Mel, I found this book online I wish had found long ago- it would have saved me learning piecemeal about the history of money in the US: http://www.mises.org/Books/mysteryofbanking.pdf
You are a banker aren't you? Did I see that in one of the blogs? I hope so, because I might have some questions to put to you.
I liken the plight of most bankers to the plight of the antebellum plantation owner- caught up in a system they didn't create and can't stop. Alan Greenspan wrote in 'Gold and Economic Freedom' in 1966 "This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard."
Greenspan then went on, for reasons known only to himself, to chairman of the FED and to help engineer our present crisis.
My math in the above post may not be exactly right but the principle is sound, that banks create money and earn interest on it.
Things are so out of hand in the US the FED has set up a system of programs to indoctrinate school children, telling them things like "money is an illusion" and "gold has no inherent value". One of the local programs is called Bank at School; local banks go into the schools to oversee "approved" monetary curriculum and let the kids play bank with real deposits. The banks aren't content with mortgages on the parent's homes, they want control of the kid's piggy banks too. They pay the kids .25 percent more on their accounts than they do the parents. Now, think of this, of all the businesses in the US only the banks are allowed into the schools to sell their wares, and these programs are directed at lower middle and low income communities.
The FED does a comic book series for children, and has educatinal pages with games on FRB websites. One has a game with a room that equates the FED with Santa, telling the kids that the FED provides extra cash for Christmas. In this game, if you go to Fedville and go to the firestation and click on the dalmation, a window comes up that asks "When is Benjamin Franklin not Benjamin Franklin? Find out more about counterfeit money when you click on this Trivia Card". You click on the Trivia Card and a window comes up that explains how the FED stores excess cash for when banks need it, like for Christmas shopping. Is this, I wonder, some kind of inside joke? The Trivia Card turns up a Federal Reserve note after inviting you to learn more about counterfeit money! Fedville: http://www.frbsf.org/education/fedville/
Mel, I hope you can take the time to visit Fedville and just look around. At the Fedville FRB you can learn that there are three currency eras in the US, the Civil War Era (the first paper currency issue), the Industrial Era (gold standard) and the NATIONAL STABILITY ERA (the ear of paper Federal Reserve Notes). haha! These guys at the Fed are irrepresible pirates! I am glad we are still living in the Natinal Stability Era. Countless recessions, one Great Depression, and probably standing on the threshold of the Greater Depression! National Instability would be a terrible thing, thank whatever God we are trusting in the Fed has saved us from that!
In olden days merchants employed ships they called revenue cruisers. The Fed banks are like revenue cruisers sailing on land, dominating the smaller merchant vessels around them, holding them under their massive guns, spoils of war.
In their educational material for children the Fed explains why Fed policies sometimes are ineffective (fail miserabley to serve the good of the people). The reason is that people do not respond to Fed policy as they ought to! You have to love these guys, and respect them for the fierce captains they are.
I am thinking of advising my nephew to consider educating himself for a positon at the Fed, so at least he won't be on the wrong end of the stick.
>After the Civil War
>the central bankers
>in England sponsored
>a bill through direct
>bribes to US congressmen
>to have silver
>demonetized, creating
>the "gold standard".
I must say I've never heard this before.
Congressmen taking money from the Great Satan? I'd be interested to know how they managed to pay off enough members of Congress (and presumably the President, too, not to veto the bill.
What was in it for the English bankers, that they were prepared to go to such lengths?
I will look up a reference for you on this in a day or so and you can be the judge of the validity.
The English bankers wanted to put a stop to a movement in America that was pushing for a reissue of paper currency. They wanted America under a system they could profit. If America had its own system closed to the outside, access could only be obtained at exchange rates set by America.
Here is an early source Mel. I've seen at least one other discussing the bribery around the demonetization of silver: http://books.google.com/books?id=HL_64rinz-EC&pg=PA1248&lpg=PA1248&dq=us+congressmen+bribed+by+english+bankers+to+demonetize+silver&source=bl&ots=okmCjqqnKV&sig=b1zmz-AR8JAQE_07wf1wALM8yZo&hl=en&ei=xoGuSevtHdyymQeumtWiBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result
I hope this takes you to it, it is on page 1248.
Now hold on there a minute, Marty, I think you are blaming the Brits too much for a central banking system that Americans also supported--namely Alexander Hamilton, the demigod of New York. Yes, he was a British merchant in the West Indies (unlike native-born Franklin), but his "Report on Manufactures" is still considered the founding document of American finance.
Personally, I'm a Jeffersonian in that regard, believing in the value of smaller republics and economies. However, even Jefferson recognized debt was useful for such things as the Louisiana Purchase. We all have our moments of cognitive dissonance.
Thanks for giving me a laugh there James.
Hamilton may have been a good writer of financial documents, and he certainly was an advocate of central banking, but he was a very poor duelist.
Hamilton, though representative of the axiom that finance has no nationality, was not a very good central banker even if his heart was in the right place. Hamilton, like Jefferson, believed in a fixed value for the basic unit of currency. There is another clue that leads me to specualte Hamilton may have done something to incite ill favor from the higher priests of money. The portraits on American currency are all of people who opposed fiat currency and central banking, with the exception of Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was on the largest denomination, the $100,000 if I remember right, and Hamilton is on the $5. Salmon Chase used to be on the $10,000.
Wilson deserves his place of honor since he ushered in the FRB under the guidance of Mandell House. Chase sat on the Supreme Court and opined that the legal tender value of money is useful for only dishonest purposes. How come Hamilton is down there among the rabble rousers? If I ever figure this out I will let everyone know! :)
Debt can be useful if in taking on the debt the public gains something of greater monetary value, and repays the debt with an article of real value so the transaction is complete.
Unpayable debt, or debt that is continually payed by taking out new loans, is of much more dubious value. Infinitely more dubious value in a time when depository institutions have no reserve requirements on the first 9 million of loans, 3% on loans from 9 to 43 million, and a 10% reserve on loans after that.
James, I should have said as well thanks for bringing up the Louisiana Purchase and the "Report on Manufactures". I'll look up that report and read it.
Also, I should make it clear that I don't blame the British people, our kinsmen. You never hear that a group of farmers in Croatia, or a group of farmers in Wales, want to invade Arkansas and drive the Ozarkians off their land. That kind of business does not originate with the people, it only originates with government and those in a position to profit off the government.
Someone said to remind you that you are too pessimistic about the good nature of people. :)
I'm not sure Hamilton was an American, back in those days nationalism as we now know it hadn't taken hold, the Revolution was driven more by allegiance to ideas of rights than waving flags, notwithstanding the paradoxical treatment of certain groups of people. (When serving the Lord, you have to do what you have to do)
America was full of people, the majority, who did not want to separate from England. I mean, even into modern times wasn't G. H. W. Bush knighted? Isn't that done to people who serve the Queen in some way?
OK, Marty, here we go--it's goose quills at 20 paces! Gentlemen, sharpen your weapons!
Marty said:
"In 1931 FDR directed ordered all gold to be turned in to the nearest Federal Reserve Bank under threat of heavy fines and prison sentences."
Is that a typo? FDR was not president until 1933.
As for nationalism, if it had not taken hold in revolutionary times, then why did de Crevecoeur famously write about "What then is the American?"
Hamilton was the bastard child of a Scotch merchant who hoped to create an American aristocracy of merit, because he had no hope of being recognized in English society. Yet I agree with you that an aristocracy of money (created by today's global class warfare) is no more to be desired than an aristocracy of blood.
At least I hope you are a small-r republican on that last account.
One other comment, Marty. Alex is on the $10 note; honest Abe is on the $5. Was that another clue that you are a Confederate sympathiser? And it is Alex's bill that has "We the People" prominently written over it, to my dismay. Alex derided "We the Sheeple."
When it comes to factual errors on my part James I am totally liberal, and believe fully in the subjective, illusory quality of facts. Truth is what we decide it is.
The Gold Confiscation Of April 5, 1933
From: President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt
To: The United States Congress
Dated: 5 April, 1933
Presidential Executive Order 6102
Section 2. All persons are hereby required to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal Reserve bank or a branch or agency thereof or to any member bank of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates now owned by them or coming into their ownership on or before April 28, 1933, except the following
Alas, you have wonded me, yet I will not so soon call on my second!
I said natinalism as we now know it, the flag waving stuff. That stuff was promoted by Edward and Francis Bellamy, to national socialists in the late 1800 and early 1900's. Before that time the citizens of the states did not gather round a penis with a name tag on it and extend their right hand palm down while chanting to the name of the penis.
I'll get back to you on What Then is an American.
Down here in Mississippi we don't get ahold of much folding money, what we have we jimgles in Prince Albert cans.
However, a kindly young lady did let me take a peek at a $10 and sure enough, there sat the pale face of Hamilton.
You can put me down as a full supporter of the Articles of Confederation. They were plenty good enough. The last time Mississippi was in danger of being attacked by anything other than federal troops they decided it was easier to turn around and go bakc the other way.
My Mo Mo (Mississippian for grandmother) rolled her own from a Prince Albert can, so I am familiar with its many uses.
And yes, Bellamy did introduce the horrid pledge of stupidity. The penile poles were a later iteration.
But the Articles of Confederation had us bankrupt because no state wanted to pay taxes, so unpaid Revolutionary War veterans in western Massachusetts had to seize the courts to stop foreclosure of their farms by Boston bankers. Sound familiar?
As Shakespeare would say, "The first thing let's do is kill all the bankers." (Sorry, Mel)
Lovely Portia,
I can't help but feel that the problems of Massachussetts would have been best left to the citizens of the state; that they alone should have been left to decide if if were proper for the farmer who risked life in search of freedom to be taxed to guarantee the risk of the merchant who risked money in search of gain. Closing down the debtor courts was a suitable and effective measure.
When government fails why must we create a larger one with more opportunity and potential for failure?
I'm no expert on these matters though, so what do I know? Misperception is said by Patanjali to be the most common of the five human modalities of thought, yet through repeated contact with misperception one finally arrives at right perception. Could it be that we as a nation, and as a world, are only acting out this principle in the revisions of our attempts to govern ourselves, and that one distant day we will rule ourselves appropriately?
Gentle Portia, daughter and sister of our birthland,
The quality of revolt is not restrain'd.
It droppeth as the pelting rain from heaven upon the place beneath.
It is once blest, and once cursed:
It blesseth him that takes, and curseth him that causeth.
The kindly Mr. Madison, our paradoxical friend in arms against the tyranny, has, as does the gentle rain bless, blessed me with knowledge of the letters of Yeoman Crevecoeur (though he rather flung them at me as a blessed missile).
From the mentioned pages, so vehemently flung, I find this:
"Ye poor Europeans, ye, who sweat, and work for the great---ye, who are obliged to give so many sheaves to the church, so many to your lords, so many to your government, and have hardly any left for yourselves--ye, who are held in less estimation than favourite hunters or useless lap-dogs--ye, who only breathe the air of nature, because it cannot be withheld from you; it is here that ye can conceive the possibility of those feelings I have been describing; it is here the laws of naturalization invite every one to partake of our great labours and felicity, to till unrented untaxed lands!"
Do you, grave Portia, grieve as I that now in this once favored land we sustaining daughters and sons of the ideals of liberty are obliged to give so many sheaves we have scarely enough left for ourselves? That we are held in less estimation than hunters of favor and useless lapdogs? That we may now breath and expel the air of nature only because it can be taxed, as now the lands are? Do you grieve that we are left with the greater measure of labor, and lesser measure of felicity?
I fear Mr. Madison will be disheartened when he realizes the old world has followed the new man into the new world, that the form it has taken is the protector he so championed; that his champion has become liege-lord of those who labored so to bring him to power.
James and Marty, thanks for letting us witness your charming joust. I don't have anything to add to your discussion; will leave that to any bankers on this blog.
I think in this blog I'll do the posts and leave all the intelligent discussion to you commenters. :)
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