The American Spectator

Ben Stein's Diary

The Age of Fraud

By Ben Stein from the February 2009 issue

Sunday

So here I am in Rancho Mirage reading about Bernie Madoff and Marc Dreier and Governor Blagojevich and I am thinking:

Now is the age of fraud.

On one day there is the governor of Illinois alleged to have defrauded the citizens and the law by offering to sell political appointments.

A few days later there is a major power on Wall Street apparently admitting that his family investment business, which had taken in $17 billion from friends and charities and university endowments, was a total Ponzi scheme and there was no money left. The bogus financier had used some of the money to finance a lifestyle with immensely expensive homes and a yacht.

Then the next day there’s a story about a major Manhattan lawyer who had a similarly opulent lifestyle, maintaining a yacht with a permanent crew of 10 and lavish parties for beautiful young people.

Then of course there was the massive nationwide fraud of sub-prime mortgages. And little by little we see that those miraculous money-makers called hedge funds were often frauds that took investor money to keep the hedge fund manager living like a maharajah.

Why should we be surprised? This is an age that has energetically suppressed religious belief. You get laughed out of court if you try to put up an image of the Ten Commandments--the origin of most laws--anywhere near a courthouse. You get treated as if you were an imbecile fascist if you even dare to ask--just ask--how Darwinism and random chance could have produced gravity or thermodynamics. Could there have been a God who made these laws happen? You are not allowed to ask.

But in an age that explicitly mocks faith in a higher power, people still have to believe in something. For many, that something is money, luxurious living, opulent display on a stupefying scale.

If there is no God, then man sometimes thinks he is god, and sometimes tries to live like a god.

It’s really amazing that in the age of unbelief, as a smart man called it, there isn’t even more fraud. After all, with no God, there’s no one to ever call you to account, and no accounting at all if you can get away with it.

So this is what we are left with: the age of unbelief, the age of material things, the age of fraud. Not a pretty picture for the New Year. I mean, think about it. If there is no God, why bother to tell the truth? Why not steal? If we are just specks of dust hit by lightning, if we have no spark of God in us, why not just take whatever we can and devil take the hindmost? I mean, we are fools not to do that if there is no right or wrong. So, I can sort of see where Bernie Madoff and Marc Dreier and Governor Blagojevich and many others are coming from. By that same evil standard, I can see where Hitler was coming from and where Stalin and Mao Tse-tung and Castro got their ideas.

As I was writing about this, I corresponded with a close relative who said she had heard Madoff was a religious man. I answered, “Perhaps observant but certainly not religious.” How could he be a religious man and loot charities? How could he be a religious man and steal from his friends?

(By the way, long ago I read a tale about my old nemesis, Michael Robert Milken. Apparently he was going to wildly overcharge a close friend and associate for some transaction. Milken’s colleague said to him, “But Mike, he’s one of our oldest friends.” To which Milken replied, “If we can’t steal from our friends, who can we steal from?” I didn’t personally hear this. I just read about it.)

There is a lot of confusion in all faiths between observance and religion. No man need ever go to a synagogue or church to be religious or godly. No amount of memorizing the Bible or Hebrew prayers will make a man godly if his life is basically about larceny.

Letter to the Editor