Madoff's Accomplices: His Victims (Nocera)

Finally, somebody in a mainstream publication says something close to what I have been thinking about the Madoff victims. In a column last Friday entitled Madoff Had Accomplices: His Victims, Joe Nocera argues that the investors whom Madoff cheated were irresponsible. As I will argue below, I think they were showed not just personal irresponsibility, but possibly also ethical and political irresponsibility. But here's Nocera:

I like Nocero's line of thinking, but I wish he'd gone beyond personal investment advice. There is an argument to be made that Madoff's victims—or some of them, at least—and (it should be added) plenty of other big-money investors, are guilty not only of failing in their duties to themselves to invest their money wisely, but also failing ethically to invest their money in ways that don't harm other people. And if this is true of the Madoff investors, then it's true of a lot of other investors in Wall Street's latest high-flying phase.

Take Elie Wiesel, for example. Here are some excerpts from the NY Times article about Wiesel's comments at the Portfolio forum Nocera mentions:

Elie Wiesel Levels Scorn at Madoff

And this:

Now, the punishment Wiesel describes sounds a lot like torture to me—solidary confinement alone is torture—so I was a little taken aback that Wiesel called for it. But what about a humanitarian and professor of ethics like Wiesel failing to look into the source of his and his foundation's investment profits? In the case of Madoff, the source was theft—Madoff and his accomplices used new investors' money to pay interest to older investors (this is what a Ponzi scheme is). But what if Madoff had just been a "good" (i.e., effective) money-manager (albeit with less consistently, and suspiciously, reliable returns), and had been paying Wiesel and his foundation interest that came from, say, companies that outsourced jobs to sweatshops; leveraged buyouts of companies that were then gutted and resold; companies that pollute; companies engaged in predatory lending; etc. etc.—that is to say, the usual sources of Wall Street megaprofits? Madoff was stealing from people, but many a money-manager who hasn't been branded "the most hated man in New York" (as one of the tabloids, I believe, put it), or called a "monster" on the cover of New York magazine has been complicit in plenty of human misery. Would Wiesel have known?