Tag Archives: Control Fraud

By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzinga.com)

There are at least four principles that virtually all conservatives purport to support – except when the potential defendant is socially elite.  I have written previously about two of these principles on several occasions – the need for accountability and “broken windows” theory that calls for the prosecutors to make the prosecution of even minor street crimes a high priority if they have, even indirectly, a material effect on the community.

The third principle is that it is vital to punish in order to deter crime.  Gary Becker, the very conservative Nobel laureate in economics, emphasized this point (again, in the context of street crime).  Under Becker’s theory of crime our current practices of allowing elite banksters to become wealthy through leading the “sure thing” of accounting control fraud with immunity from the criminal laws will predictably lead to new, larger epidemics of fraud that will continue to cause our recurrent, intensifying financial crises.  It is rare, however, to find a prominent conservative who is demanding a priority effort to prosecute the elite bank officers who ran those frauds.  I know of no conservative member of Congress publicly making that demand today.  Senator Chuck Grassley has previously criticized the Obama administration’s failure to prosecute elite bankers.

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