Spitzer has resigned. Not exactly a shocker. To say a word on the commentary, though, Ruth Marcus makes a point I keep hearing. "Of all the people who should have been smart enough to avoid this, it is Spitzer," she writes. The prosecutor who was careful enough to avoid wire transfers but too reckless to heed the other, obvious perils. How could he not have realized that he was easily recognizable? How could he not have worried about the inevitable cyber-trail of cellphone records and e-mails? At some level, he must have wanted to be caught." You get this sort of thing a lot. When a smart, powerful individual does something, it's evidence that he or she had some deep psychological desire to be caught. But no! People are just dumb sometimes. They discount the future, they overestimate their cleverness, they forget that just because something feels private doesn't mean it is private. Spitzer wanted to get laid, and he wanted to get laid in a way that no one would find out about. He was simply wrong on how insulated the trysts were from unexpected government investigations into his cash withdrawal. He's a smart guy whose libido convinced him to do a dumb thing. Elsewhere, my wise and learned boss says, "I suspect that what makes a prostitute worth $5,500 an hour is that she costs $5,500 an hour. The value here doesn't dictate the price. The price, rather, dictates the value. These women are available only to the wealthy; the ability to hire them, like the ability to live on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, means that you've made it. And even if your hour turns out to be a bit disappointing, that's okay, because $5,500 doesn't really mean anything to you -- which just means you've really made it." In other words, Harold continues, Spitzer was buying a "positional good." But a positional good only really works if other people know you're buying it. I understand that Spitzer could get some satisfaction from burning the money, but there are lots of things he could have burnt money buying, and he doesn't seem to have been that type. His positional good, rather, was power. He paid so much for a prostitute because the price suggested the professionalism. Anyone being paid that well had enough financial incentive and institutional pressure to keep his secret an actual secret. "Kristen" was already raking in the money. She wouldn't need to sell his pictures to the tabloids. And, indeed, she didn't. It was a government investigation that outed him. The $5,500 worked just as it was supposed to. The problem was, paying that much, in cash, for professionalism left investigators wondering what exactly Spitzer was paying for.
