Veterans Affairs investigators spent two years investigating an Iraq War veteran named William Rich and charged him this month with wire fraud and theft of government property for having faked being a paraplegic after being wounded by an improvised explosive device. He collected over a million in benefits intended to support his disability and spent them otherwise, including buying a luxury car.
It’s hard to feel any sympathy for Rich. Like a lot of people involved in petty fraud, he didn’t do much to hide what he was doing, posting pictures of himself walking and exercising on social media and so on.
I was once seated on a jury for a civil suit where the plaintiff was alleging serious neck and muscular injury from a minor car accident. He had an osteopath testify on his behalf. On cross-examination, the opposing attorney asked about the osteopath’s assessment of the extent of the plaintiff’s post-accident disability. The osteopath testified that the plaintiff had been incapable of anything but minimal independent motion for the year since the accident and would require years of physical therapy to achieve even some semblance of his former health. The defense attorney then introduced evidence about the plaintiff having gone on a weeklong Class IV whitewater rapids trip two weeks after the accident and having run in a half-marathon two months after it and asked the osteopath how that was possible. The osteopath shrugged and said, “I don’t know”. It was a short deliberation. The plaintiff’s attorney got paid something, I would guess, but I don’t know why the plaintiff thought he was going to share in the payday.
We’ll never know just how much of this kind of thing really goes on, or what exactly people are thinking when they do it. I knew someone once who explained the difference between her collecting unemployment insurance after her retirement based on a fraudulent attestation that she was looking for work and the kind of “welfare” that she railed against others collecting as follows: I deserve it and they don’t. William Rich probably thought something similar: I was actually wounded and I actually fought in the war, this country owes me something, and nobody’s getting hurt if I collect what I’m owed.
Sometimes it’s also just a very mild extension of the ethos of capitalism. Everyone howled at the men who tried to hoard masks at the outset of the pandemic, but they were little different than the top-level hoarders whose profits have largely gone unquestioned. Some little fish tried to scam the federal government or various institutions by selling PPE they didn’t have and they got caught, but big players who either stay just inside the lines or who redraw the lines to suit themselves can’t and won’t get caught. Privatize profit, socialize risk. And that creates another line of self-justification: I am not doing anything different than the CEO of Wells Fargo. I am just doing what Peter Thiel has called for his whole life: playing to win the game and nothing else. Whatever you can do, you do. Whatever you can get away with, you do.
The real difference in 21st Century America is not a moral one. It is the difference that power makes. The current order creates layers of misdirection around the direct use of power by those who have it. We do not see orders given, instructions issued, decisions made. Those transmit to the sites where power is exerted via insulating structures, through management and legal counsel and impersonal decrees, to an extent that at either end of the transmission, people may not even understand themselves to be relationally connected or individually responsible for what is done to them or what they are doing to others. People are not wrong if they think the powerful are mostly unaccountable for actions that the less powerful may be readily caught and punished for.
So some handful of William Riches can get two years of investigation and get caught. A million lost, probably about 300k spent verifying that it was lost and bringing a criminal charge for that. How much will be coming back into the government coffers? Maybe enough to break even on the whole thing, maybe not. We can believe that if a handful get caught, another handful decide it’s too risky to try something similar. And the perceived risk of William Riches ends up justifying the construction of intricate bureaucratic mazes that create burdens and humiliations for the people who would never do what he did to claim the benefits that they’re fully entitled to.
In the meantime, the IRS doesn’t investigate the wealthy any longer: it’s too hard and too expensive to catch them. The SEC doesn’t bother trying to monitor the malfeasance of the most powerful firms: they’re too big to fail, in any event. OSHA just goes after a relative handful of violations at best. The EPA picks its fights carefully even when it’s not under the control of an executive branch that doesn’t want it to do a damn thing.
The only thing that the William Riches forget is that in the real world that the powerful have built, it is not that it is wrong to steal and lie, but that you need to have enough power to do that safely. If you do, go right ahead: no harm will come to you. If you don’t, well, spin the wheel and take your chances. And maybe don’t post to Instagram.
Image credit: "Spin the wheel" by Adam Tinworth is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0