The national celebration this weekend in the United States, and the coming Bastille Day celebration in France, serve as platforms for scrutiny of issues of public policy and private conduct.

Two recent personal experiences provide the context for this question: As a society how should we judge, concerning the balance between private wealth accumulation for personal consumption and its deployment for the public good?

The issues are emotion-laden and politically divisive, not least around the regulation of executive compensation. There, a pigs’ breakfast of policy choices includes salary limitations, bonus caps, use of bail-out funds, and director and shareholder responsibility – and the loftier themes of norm setting and coercive codes of conduct.

(For helpful background on the current state of play in Washington, the always-informative Edith Orenstein had this post last week on her FEI blog.)

Last Saturday I was curbside in search of a taxi when accosted by a waif-like beggar. The dollar I peeled off generated a persistent plea from the wrinkled crone, that she needed eight dollars for a bed in the shelter that night.

Influenced by reasons shortly to be told, I handed over a fistful of small bills – and was rewarded by a rainbow smile and effusive thanks when she realized that her daily quota was made. For the price of a stop at the nearest Starbucks, I had enabled a poor woman to spend a night in the safety and security that her life otherwise lacked.

The stimulus to my altruism was the party we had just left: the conclusion of what had been the most elaborate and costly family ritual ever to cross my vision. We had declined and not attended the main events — a week of feasting and partying in a far distant venue — said by guests to have set back the patriarch on the order of $ 8 to $ 10 million.

Recalling all the weddings and bar mitzvahs and sweet sixteen parties that at the time seemed over the top — on the scale of this extended festival, they reduce in comparison to tea at the Ritz.

To transport the guests, private jets had filled the trans-oceanic skies. Public buildings had been closed – private castles had been opened – platoons of hostelers and caterers and entertainers had exceeded their annual revenue goals. Couturiers and florists and photographers and heavy-weight security guards had all worked overtime. Even on the pale evidence of the slideshow and videos, the maligned notion of “trickle-down” had been a frothy and multi-colored cascade. 

Thinking of the number of homeless shelters that could be supported by the cost of this extravaganza, it would be tempting to point the bony finger of self-righteous indignation – to turn up a censorious bluenose at the questionable morality of such an ostentatious display of personal consumption. 

All the more, since the paterfamilias ranks in the low digits on the Forbes scale of his country’s self-made wealthy. Only exceptional naïveté could believe that he had moved in one generation from pushcart and sweatshop to chateau and polo grounds, unless with the considerable application of both grease and muscle.

And yet: he is a reverent and devout practitioner of his religious faith, generous and philanthropic at a level beyond common contemplation. His annual benefactions are many multiples of the one-time cost of this family celebration, even at its lavish scale. As a percentage of his wealth, the outlay for this week-long party was several orders smaller than the impositions willingly incurred for a typical middle-class wedding or baby shower or graduation ceremony.

And in the end, the entrepreneurship by which he achieved the status to stage such a display of largesse would be untouchable by the debatable constraints of “say-on-pay” or narrow bonus limits – exercises in small-bore legislative vision that are of doubtful effectiveness but only stimulate hypocrisy, evasion and misdirected incentives.

The evidence of society’s broad range of behavior is far too complex and ambiguous to support facile condemnations – that the ownership classes are unexceptionally venal and corrupt, or that every bonus payment is an incentive to greed and over-reaching. Neither, symmetrically, is there any necessary correlation of virtue or magnanimity with the poverty of the ghetto or the favela.

More importantly in the quest for guidance, skepticism is certainly indicated about the potential for leadership from the politicians. In the degraded atmosphere that extends from the tawdry antics of a Berlusconi or the soap opera of a Palin to the expense fiddles of the British parliamentarians and the parade of Republican “affairs of state,” restraint is indicated in expectations for legislated morality.

Does a tithe for the poor excuse the gaudy display of the other ninety percent? Must the owner of two coats yield one to the unclothed? And is it the business of the state to compel the answers? Or if not, then whose?

Those wrapped in the luxury of this extraordinary celebration enjoyed hospitality at an unmatched level. How well they’d have slept in their silks and linens, if mindful of the beggar scratching out the price of a bare cot, is more ambiguous.

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