DeSantis spent 11 years at AIG. He had nothing to do with the credit default swaps that brought down the company, and, as he points out, most of the people who did have long since departed. As DeSantis says, "After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials." As a result of that persecution, according to DeSantis, "The only real motivation that anyone at A.I.G.-F.P. now has is fear. Mr. Cuomo has threatened to 'name and shame,' and his counterpart in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, has made similar threats — even though attorneys general are supposed to stand for due process, to conduct trials in courts and not the press." Unfortunately, DeSantis makes a cardinal error. Because he is financially secure and thinks, like many people, that those in his profession often make too much money, he's decided to donate his bonus to charity. He claims that he is not motivated by guilt, but he has nonetheless bought into the altruistic premise that motivates the mob mentality against him and the others who have received these bonuses.
If you want a sense of this mob mentality, read the comments to the piece on the NY Times's website. There are over 900 comments. I didn't read all of them, but based on my rough sampling, the vast majority are critical of Mr. DeSantis. Here's a sample.
"I would respectfully suggest that Mr. DeSantis not let the door hit him on the butt on the way out. He can preen all he wants about how his grotesque levels of past compensation were fully justified, but they weren't. What we have in this letter is the infantile whining of a overstuffed baby who just had the teeth pulled from his mouth. Good riddance!"
"Mr. De Santis and his cohorts believe, sincerely, that they are entitled to their outrageous riches."
"Mr. DeSantis received, in one check and after taxes, more than I will earn in my professional management position in the next 7 years. . . . He points out that he's contributed to profitable business for AIG; he ignores the fact that he helped AIG earn those profits using other people's money."
"This gentleman still thinks he deserves this obscene compensation because he worked hard!!! He worked in the company for ten years creating this bubble, he should return all the bonuses he has received and dedicate the rest of his life to charitable work. He needs to be reeducated in the new reality."
Reading these comments, I can't help but wonder whether it is too late to save America. The level of blind hatred for wealth and those who create it, the level of pure envy, to say nothing of the level of economic ignorance in these letters is striking. Then I remind myself that these are readers of the New York Times, which represents the worst of the worst of envious, man-hating leftist thought, and that not all Americans think this way.
If you have trouble understanding why altruism--the code of self-sacrifice--is evil, read these letters. Ask yourself how a code that is allegedly motivated by benevolence and love of one's fellow man can result is such venom directed at a man who worked hard and believed that his company would honor its contractual obligations. And note that none of the letters are satisfied with Mr. DeSantis's decision to donate his bonus to charity. Why? Because he committed the irredeemable sin of making money and refusing to apologize for it. He is still wealthy, and thus has so much more to sacrifice before he can be considered moral. Indeed, he has a lifetime of sacrifice left to atone for his sins.
If you want to understand more about these issues, and, indeed, what is happening to the world, read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Mr. DeSantis's letter and the AIG bonus issue call several scenes to mind. In one, Francisco D'Anconia is trying to convince, Hank Rearden, a steel producer, that he has accepted a moral code that is leading to his and other producers' destruction. Rearden has produced a new alloy that is stronger than steel. It was used for the rail of a new line of railroad company Taggart Transcontinental. Here's an excerpt, slightly edited for space:
Francisco: "Are you proud of the rail of the John Galt line?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because it is the best rail ever made."
"Why did you make it?"
"In order to make money."
"There were many easier ways to make money. Why did you choose the hardest?"
" . . . in order to exchange the best of my effort for the best effort of others."
"[H]ave you achieved it?"
. . . "No."
"Have you made any money?"
"No."
"When you strain your energy to its utmost in order to produce the best, do you expect to be rewarded for it or punished?" Rearden did not answer. "By every standard of decency, of honor, of justice known to you--are you convinced that you should have been rewarded for it?"
"Yes" . . .
"Then if you were punished, instead--what sort of code have you accepted?"
Later in the scene, Francisco asks Rearden what sort of person he wanted to see use his rail. Francisco lists a number of examples, then gets to this:
"Did you want to see it used by whining rotters who never rouse themselves to any effort, who do not possess the ability of a filing clerk, but demand the income of a company president, who drift from failure to failure and expect you to pay their bills, who hold their wishing as equivalent of your work and their need as a higher claim to reward than your effort, who demand that you serve them, who demand that it be the aim of your life to serve them, who demand that your strength be the voiceless, rightless, unpaid, unrewarded slave of their impotence, who proclaim that you are born to serfdom by reason of your genius, while they are born to rule by the grace of incompetence, that yours is only to give, but theirs only to take, that yours is to produce, but theirs to consume, that you are not to be paid, neither in matter nor in spirit, neither by wealth nor by recognition nor by respect nor by gratitude--so that they would ride on your rail and sneer at you and curse you, since they owe you nothing, not even the effort of taking off their hats which you paid for? Would this be what you wanted? Would you feel proud of it?"
"I'd blast that rail first," said Rearden, his lips white.
People often accuse Ayn Rand of creating caricatures of those she criticized in her novels. No one really acts like the altruists that Rand depicts in her novels, they claim. No one really says those things.
As evidence that Rand did not exaggerate at all, I give you the 917 New York Times readers who commented on Mr. DeSantis's letter. You be the judge.
1 comment:
When I heard the letter read aloud on a local radio station, I wanted to stand up and applaud.
Although my husband and I do not together make nearly what Mr. DeSantis does, neither do we shoulder the enormous responsibility he took on when he decided to stay with AIG and work on unwinding the FP division. Nevertheless, we are aware that there are those who would have cause to envy us. And that is precisely the problem with envy--there is always someone better off than oneself.
I. too, cringed when Mr. DeSantis said he would donate all of it to charity. However, I understood when he said that he prefers to designate what happens to his money rather than have the government do it.
From that portion of his letter, I believe he thinks of the money as tainted, and since he is comfortable, he'd rather choose how to dispose of it than let someone else do the choosing.
This is a man who'd rather live on his feet than on his knees.
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