You can understand why Leona Helmsley might want a $45,000 silver clock modeled after a building owned by her billionaire husband, even if you wouldn't want one yourself. What's harder to understand is why she would bother breaking the law to get it. That, in fact, is part of her lawyer's answer to official charges that the Helmsleys cheated the Government of $4 million in taxes by wrongly charging off sundry personal gewgaws as business expenses: Would people so rich risk jail for an amount so (relatively) small?
Maybe Mrs. Helmsley did it as a public service. After all, her calamity has brought pleasure to millions. The sacrifice of plutocrats on the altar of public scandal is a treasured ritual of the American civil religion. And the Helmsleys were already among the least sympathetic of the wealth celebrities coughed up by the Reagan era. He is a landlord: 50,000 apartments, along with other real estate. She is the self-proclaimed "queen" of his hotel chain, famous for being nasty to the help, and a walking exaggeration of every cliche about the second wife as a social type. The obvious diagnosis of what ails the Helmsleys -- greed -- doesn't explain much, either morally or practically. Few of us lack greed. And, in our economic system, there is nothing wrong with greed. A variety of diagrams and mathematical formulas is available to show how capitalism usually channels individual greed into productive activity that's good for society as a whole. But, if anything, the Helmsleys ought to be exempt from the forces that stimulate greed in the rest of us. They're already worth an estimated $1.4 billion. They're 67 and 79 years old, with no children. They give to charity generously, but not obsessively. Although the Helmsleys try harder than most other superrich, there's no way they're going to spend what they've already got. So why cheat the Government to get more?
Indeed, the question of what may have motivated one superrich couple to break the law is less interesting than the question of what motivates all of them to keep on accumulating, legally or otherwise. A central assumption of supply-side economics -- the dominant economic theology of the past decade, which produced large tax-rate cuts for the wealthy -- is that people are % motivated by rather fine calculations about the reward for further effort. Supply-siders are the chiropractors of capitalism, believing that small manipulations of the incentive structure can produce enormous changes in economic behavior. That may be true for those of us who have some use -- if not real need -- for everything we earn. But is it true of those at the very top of the economy?