pumpkinstrokemarrow

Perhaps spurred on by the rye and as someone who sometimes takes a high moral tone, I have been pondering about morals at the margin. So the other day, I committed the minor offence of buying a rail ticket, discounted for a wrinkly (the name given by some to a senior citizens rail card), when I was not actually carrying said wrinkly. I think that this non-carriage invalidated the discount, the rule being that you have to be able to present the wrinkly upon demand by a duly authorised representative of south west trains. As it happened, I was not challenged and the designers of the electronic gates at neither Vauxhall nor Epsom had thought to make provision for presentation of wrinkly - although I imagine they were fully up for detecting the the ticket presented was a discount ticket. The second minor offence arose at Waitrose where I presented one item at the quick service counter (the one that does fags) and bought another. The very young assistant only charged me for the item bought, not the item presented. Being a bit dozy at the time I only got as far as thinking that I did not seem to have paid very much, without working out why. Which I did after I had left the shop but I did not go back to rectify the error. I wonder what a Catholic priest would have to say if I confessed to him? Take fifteen hail marys? Is the test doing the thing deliberately and knowingly? A test which the first case passes but the second fails. Do I know anyone who would take discussion of such a matter seriously?

Will I enjoy the free item - kippers from Craster - more or less in consequence?

Tiring of that, moved onto pondering about the billions of pounds that the Irish lost on 13th November. The theory that some proportion of the billions of pounds that the banks have lost has wound up in peoples' pockets and that the balance has been spent, perhaps on things which are or have become worthless. But even the money spent is in someone's pocket. It has all gone somewhere. The question is, is it right or possible to try and get any of it back?

Case 1, I am the quarryman who sold the sand to build the houses to break the bank of Ireland. I sold lots of sand in good faith to a builder I have been working with for years. I don't think I had any duty to check that the builder intended to break the bank. My duty was to check that he could pay for the sand, which he could. There was also the duty to pay tax on my gains, which I have and so to that extent I am contributing towards sorting the mess out. But nothing else. Don't see that I should give my profits back to the government or anyone else.

Case 2, I am the speculator who sold the land to the builder. I sold lots of land to builders and made a very nice thing out of it. Maybe I wined and dined a few councillors to smooth the way for planning permissions and so on and so forth. As a speculator I knew that it could not go on for ever; the bubble was going to burst. So I had better sell as much land as I could while the going was good. Much more complicit in the resultant crash than the quarryman.

Case 3, I am chap who bought a house that I could barely afford at the time, which I cannot afford now that I have lost my job with retrenching government and which is now worth half what I paid for it. The bank reclaimed the house but went bust anyway. My wife has left me to become a lap dancer (division three) and I am now living in a cardboard box in a shrubbery in Phoenix Park. So I have perhaps been foolish, but not criminal.

Case 4, I am an investment banker in the bank that went bust and I still get my socking great bonus as the bit of the bank that I work in made money, not lost it. I try to get a group of us together to make a very public gesture of giving most if not all of our bonuses to the government, ex gratia. Try and recover the good name of bankers. But this very quickly falls apart. Very few of my colleagues are up for it and I don't see why I should do it all by myself.

So all in all, I think it is going to be very hard for government to claw back any of the lost billions from the various places in which it has wound up. It is just going to have to take them out of general taxation and balance the books that way.