Flight to Freedom ...

There are some old lines that express the notion that people may do the right thing for the wrong reasons. There was a Chad Mitchell Trio song about the John Birch Society - "Fighting for the right to fight the right fight for the Right."

There is among historians a general feeling that the revolutions of 1848, which starred patriots like Kossuth, were uprisings against imperial governments which were preventing landowning classes (the Magyars, for example) from oppressing their Slavic peasants.

And there's the U.S. Civil War, a fight for the freedom to prevent people from being free.

This article by Daniel Gross is about something similar, if much less profound; it is about banks returning huge amounts of money to the U.S. Treasury, in order to have the right to waste their shareholders' money as they wish. I own stock in Citigroup, and when I consider that my company's management chose to give back billions of dollars, which they could be using to make profits and to straighten out their business, in order to get rid of government criticism of the amounts they pay themselves.

The next stockholders' meeting, I vote to remove the entire board, to cancel the executive compensation plan, and to put Ralph Nader in charge.