DaneGeld

A thousand years ago when pillaging was done the old-fashioned way, with swords, fire and slaughter rather than with legislation, it was common practice in northern Europe to pay huge bribes to the marauding tribes of Vikings then terrorizing the continent so they would do their marauding somewhere else - taking their show on the road, so to speak. The first of these bribes was paid by the Franks in 845 to prevent the sack of Paris, the Vikings being bought off with nearly six tons of silver and gold bullion which, if valued to its maximum, would be worth over $180 million by today's standards. That's big money even if your name is Alex Rodriguez and even bigger money if you're a Dark Age pirate intent on plunder, so an idea - and a phrase - was born: DaneGeld. Shakedown money for those lawless brigands of the North so they won't torch your crops and murder everyone in sight and it worked: For the Franks and the Danes.

You see, besides being bloodthirsty ogres, the Danes were smart enough to recognize easy money when they saw it. If they could make a fortune just by threatening violence, they'd settle for making threats. If the threats worked once, they'd probably work again. For example, in 991 after their victory at the Battle of Maddon, they demanded payment of 10,000 lbs. of silver from the English king Aethelred the Unready or they would burn his kingdom to the ground, and on advice from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Aethelred paid up. The Danes took the silver and left but returned three years later and demanded more as they laid siege to London, and they got it. The cycle was repeated in 1002, 1007, 1012 and 1018, by which time the Danes had extorted nearly 167,000 lbs. of silver from the English people, nearly denuding the island of its valuables. And the practice wasn't limited to the English. The historian Snorri Sturluson reported that Finland and her neighbors paid protection money to the Swedes and that people as far east as Moscow were forced to pay tribute to the rapacious Vikings. Currency blackmailed from their northern European victims was so widespread that more English coins from that period have been found in Sweden than in England itself.

The custom of paying DaneGeld may have spared the subject populations the immediate effects of the Vikings' fury but had widespread and disastrous effects in the longer term, namely:

• The psychological damage caused by being too weak to resist and being forced to pay their enemies not to attack them.
• Rather than improving their own lives, people had to work extremely hard to make their enemies rich.
• As long as DaneGeld had to be paid, a people were kept militarily weak so all their hard work made them no stronger.
• The nobility imposed crushing taxes on the peasants to both pay the DaneGeld and to maintain their lifestyles, sacrificing the common people to a lifetime of backbreaking labor and misery.
• Paying a huge DaneGeld only encouraged the Vikings to demand another.

Even the Vikings who demanded DaneGeld were undermined by the custom. Such fabulous treasure made the reputation of many a warrior but an economy based on extortion was doomed to fail: Having starved their victims of all their gold, the Vikings also starved themselves, condemning Scandinavia to nine centuries of subsistence living.

We are now led by a chieftain no less greedy than those horn-helmeted fiends of the frosty North. His Serene Loftiness Barack Obama, current lord of the skalli at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, demands that the diligent, prosperous workers of America hand over $5.4 trillion for redistribution among his loyal subjects the poor, minorities, illegals, unions and radical environmentalists, the sum consisting of the $787 billion stimulus package, the $1 trillion bank rescue package and his FY2010 Federal budget. This is over and above the $820 billion in rebates and bailouts already approved by the Bush administration which has had zero effect on the economy, but like his Viking predecessors, Mr. Obama gives no thought to the victims of his extortion because taking their money suits his purposes, not theirs. His vision is lofty (hence the title), the radical reshaping of our capitalist, free-enterprise economy into a true socialist model, oriented away from freedom and individual opportunity and toward regulation, entitlement and mediocrity. From somewhere in his past, he is motivated by a resentment of capitalism and its accent on personal drive and achievement, a bitterness flowing from the idea that if his subjects are poor it's because they were cheated, not because they made bad decisions, lacked education, missed opportunities or simply failed. To him, corporations are corrupt and executives are swindlers, and the only way to set things right is to take their profits - stolen from the poor and unfortunate - and give them back to the peasants. Like the Vikings, Obama thinks the fastest way to wealth is to steal from someone else, not help the poor earn more themselves.

Yet his resort to stratospheric levels of taxation and spending will undo him and his class-warfare friends as the DaneGeld undid the Danes, for the same reasons:

• Simply taking money from people who earn it and giving it to people who don't is not the same as prosperity.
• The people being exploited resent it and will find ways to rebel, hurting themselves and the exploiters.
• The people doing the exploiting will always demand more, not caring that they're crushing the source of their wealth until it's gone.

It would be well for Mr. Obama to hearken to the words of Rudyard Kipling, who said the following about demanding tribute and paying it:

"It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they should succumb and go astray;

So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, You will find it better policy to say: --

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost;For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that pays it is lost!"