Blog Entry
Innocent Suffer with the Guilty
Published Mar 04 at 10:07 am
A long time ago I was in Boy Scouts. Troop 9 at Highland Baptist church was where I earned my Eagle. Every Tuesday night for several years we got together in the church basement, repeated the Scout Oath, the 12 Points of the Scout Law and of course the Pledge of Allegiance. There were plenty of campouts and special overnight field trips. As you can imagine, 20 or so prepubescent males was not an easy group to tame. My first Scoutmaster, Bob Chatham, introduced me to his favorite disciplinary tactic which I remember vividly 25 years later. Once the troop began to approach the rowdy stage, Mr. Chatham, would quip in the matter of fact voice of an electrical engineer, "Gentlemen, the innocent will suffer with the guilty."
There it was, a simple phrase that at times worked like magic as we straightened up and tended to the 7th point of the scout law, Obedience. Other times however, no matter the guilty offender of the occasion, everyone of us found our way to the military push up position, or if camping, on a midnight hike. Was it fair, of course not; but Boy Scouts is not necessarily a democracy. The ability to utilize peer pressure to insure proper behavior was the end in mind and it worked more times than not.
Unfortunately, this method has made its way to main street and will eventually hit our pocketbooks. Yesterday the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced they would begin assessing fees on all banks to cover the lost deposits of failing banks. Someone remind me why we upped the insurance from $100,000 to $250,000 per account only to turn back around and punish the prudent banks who have followed sound financial procedures for their operations. Like the midnight hike through Camp Binachi, it is not fair. But as my Dad was always quick to point out, "who promised you fair?"
I come to learn that fairness is a fairytale here on Earth. I am afraid the FDIC mess is spilt milk and there is not much to do about it. As we suffer the inequitable consequences of poor banking practices by some, let us hope we are all vigilant to the future to ensure that bad practices don't lead us astray, be it banking, investing, real estate or any other arena where the free market is suppose to be at play. Otherwise, we will once again be inviting inequitable consequences as well as government regulation.
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Skip Scaggs, Manager of Business Development
sscaggs@embdc.org