Retrieving the Wounded

Greg Reyes was scheduled to enter prison today, for eighteen months. But whether he did or did not, I have been unable to learn.

I could find no stories about it in the national newspapers. I could find no stories about it in Google News. I could find no stories in Dow Jones’s Factiva database, with its 17,000 business sources.

Finally, I called the San Francisco office of Bloomberg News, and they did not know.

If such silence were merely a matter of respecting Greg Reyes’s privacy at a terrible moment, I would be grateful for such an absence of news. But I do not believe that the media has any such respect, and besides the occasion could have been observed with a display of respect, and even of honor. There might have been an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal or Investor’s Business Daily, decrying the injustice of Reyes’s coming tribulations. There might have been denunciations of his prosecution from the many pro-capitalist bloggers who now write online every day. Yet Google Blogs turns up no such statements, not even from Larry Ribstein or Tom Kirkendall, both of whom wrote many incisive posts during the trumped-up scandal of backdating.

There is a lesson here, I think. It is one that I heard a dozen years ago from a gentleman who had seen a lot of history as the U.S. ambassador to many countries. At the age 95, he was reflecting on the Left’s unflagging efforts to control the narrative of history. (I forget whether we were discussing Sacco and Vanzetti, or Alger Hiss, or Bill Clinton.) Mournfully, he observed to me: “Conservatives do not retrieve their wounded.”

I think that the same may be said of pro-capitalists. When prosecutors and their sycophantic media start hammering a Michael Milken, a Frank Quattrone, a Jamie Olis, a Martha Stewart, or a Greg Reyes, the instinct of all but their closest capitalist friends seems to be to say, “I do not know the man.”

If the Business Rights Center has any purpose at all, it is to initiate a different approach, one that will keep raw the sense of outrage over the injustices done to Greg Reyes, and Jamie Olis, and Michael Milken—one that will retrieve our wounded.

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