Catch the Libertarianism If You Can
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do. You must jump through hoops held by politicians and bureaucrats. The fraud at the heart of pretending to be a lawyer is not that you are not a good one but that you have not obeyed the regulations that govern who is in and who is out. What’s more, the film doesn’t encourage us to be scandalized by Frank’s deceptions but rather to admire his ability to work within and around the system. The FBI is after him mainly for his financial crimes. He forges checks and cashes them, being careful to time his activities in such a way that he gets the cash before the fraud is revealed. The film makes no comment on the activities of the Federal Reserve, but when this institution buys bonds from the government, it is merely creating the money out of thin air and pumping it into the economy via its preferred bond dealers. Is what Frank is doing privately really that much more shocking than what the Fed does as a matter of its own daily operations? After all, it was a Fed official who only recently bragged of the institution’s ability to engage in a kind of alchemy. Eventually, of course, Frank is caught, but the story doesn’t end there. He has become so skilled at forgery that his services at spotting the real from the fake are sought out by the FBI. His prison term is lessened in exchange for his agreement to work for the state. By agreeing to help the government, presto, he goes from world-class criminal to respectable bureaucrat, one who is helping enforce the law. His shift from jailbird to jailer is officially sanctioned and hence not considered deception. The switch seems to be the mirror image of the switch in his father, who went from respectable professional to an impoverished member of the working class, also at the stroke of a pen. When the state defines who is rich and who is poor, who is a lawyer and who is not, who is a criminal and who is a criminal catcher, we enter into a world driven by the arbitrariness of power, and that power has real and shocking effects on people’s lives: making and breaking the human will itself. Spielberg is a specialist at Americana, and with this film he has captured the hidden resentment that many feel toward the regimentation of life that has come with the hegemony of state over society. The distinctions between real and phony, even between criminal and crime-stopper, become blurry and fleeting. Frank Abagnale, Jr., was brilliant at playing a game that the state plays on an ongoing basis.