CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

306 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
meal given till the task by which it is earned has been first performed. ...
[T]he better he works, the sooner he is out; the less he works, the longer he
stays.” 16 Bentham goes into excruciating detail about food, clothing, lodging,
bedding, child nursing, work, punishment, reward, management, and
accounting for his National Charity Company. As the philosopher
Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in 1965: “There was no question of the
‘rights’ of prisoners and paupers, for there was no such thing as rights at all.
There were only interests, and the interests of the majority had to prevail.
The greatest happiness of the greatest number might then require the greatest
misery of the few.” 17
One of Bentham’s pet projects was prison design. He conceived of a
privately-owned prison in the round, where all inmates could be observed
at all times by centrally-situated guards. Named the Panopticon, he tried
to sell his idea first in Russia and then for 20 years in England, spending a
great deal of his own money. To be sited in London on land now occupied
by the Tate Gallery, Bentham finally gave up in 1813 and was reimbursed
£23,000 by Parliament for his fruitless promotional efforts. More than a
hundred years later, his design was used to build Joliet Prison in the
United States.
In 1830 Bentham published a work entitled Constitutional Code for the
Use of All Nations and All Governments Professing Liberal Opinions. If pleasures
and pains, advantages and disadvantages, are largely the same across all
people and subject to measurement, then every nation can be served with a
similar constitutional code grounded upon utilitarian principles. The product
of 10 years of effort, it grew out of legislative proposals to and correspondence
with leading figures in Portugal, Spain, Greece, the Barbary
states, Argentina, Guatemala, Símon Bolívar in South America, and Thomas
Jefferson in the United States. Bentham makes his philosophy clear from the
outset: “Of this constitution, the all-comprehensive object or end in view is
from first to last the greatest happiness of the greatest number . . .” 18 His exhaustive
Code goes on to elaborate on sovereignty, the legislature, the prime
minister and other ministers, the judiciary, defense forces, local officials, and
public and private offenses. While influential, his Code, which was far too
exacting in its hundreds of pages of details, was never adopted by any state
and was overtaken by the U.S. Constitution, which subsequently served as a
model for many states.