The Road to Nuremburg

CNBC reports that Goldman Sachs has been sued by a pension fund and an individual in Illinois over the bonuses it plans to pay (has paid?) for 2009. These are odd suits, filed by shareholders in a company whose stock doubled in 2009.

I’m not much of an alarmist, but I must say that the focus of the financial mess on firms with Jewish names or Jewish leaders has been, as we say, very bad for the Jews. I cannot help thinking that in the same way that right-thinking Americans have gone to court to fix things that legislatures won’t touch – think Brown v. Board of Education – wrong-thinking ones are doing the same thing, trying to do in the courts what Hitler did with the infamous Nuremburg laws.

As a wise man once said, our weaknesses are just our strengths taken to excess: we all have the vices of our virtues. A court system that remedies social injustice is such a strength; it is an important national virtue. As such, however, it is a cause for vigilance lest it be subverted, and this suit sets off alarm bells for me.