It is as if the life of Charles Ponzi, who Wikipedia calls “one of the greatest swindlers in American history,” is the life and history of the Free Market personified. As I was reading about Bernard Madoff, a big time fund manager who made off with billions, about how it all finally came crashing down, it got me thinking about the free market–and the idea of ownership, of selling and buying goods, the belief that things can be owned– and how it seems like a giant ponzi scheme: there is always someone getting paid with someone else’s money, the “new” investor always pays the dividends of the other shareholders, even in situations that have periods of true profitability. Madoff came down, along with all the other companies and individuals because the system is flawed– it is built in. And it seems the flaw exists in the *idea*, and in a broader sense the ideas that govern the creation of any system, a system’s specific context of ideas, the belief system it was created out of– that the flaw exists in the idea of ownership. There was a time when, as the world of non-human animals does still, when humans did not own things. Lifestyle was sustained by environment, not by laboring in the fields or in an office.
The great Charles Ponzi transcends history; he is the soul of free market made into Man. He walked the earth, among us, awakened to future of a country where all he served was himself and time.
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