Historical vignette 1: al-Hâkim in the bazaar

A curious anecdote is told of the eccentric Egyptian Muslim ruler Abû 'Alî Mansûr Târiq al-Hâkim (reigned 996-1021). The story goes that al-Hâkim sometimes used to roam the marketplaces of Cairo, accompanied by a large, hulking slave named Mas'ûd, on the lookout for evidence of crooked dealings by the merchants hawking their wares there. If he discovered a merchant to be engaged in dishonest trade, he would order Mas'ûd to forcibly sodomize the offender right there on the spot. No statistics are available for recidivism rates in eleventh-century Egypt, but the deterrent effect of this practice must have been considerable.

When Congress gets finished with health-care reform and turns its attention to re-regulating our ethically-challenged financial sector in order to discourage a future recurrence of the behavior which precipitated the recent recession, I cannot help but wish that they would at least consider some updated version of al-Hâkim's no-nonsense approach to penalizing economic transgressions. Given the level of public anger at these arrogant miscreants, the idea might prove rather popular.