As we embark on a new administration in Washington, I think that we should also look back—back to the beginnings of Democracy. Transitioning from a presidency that aspired to imperial powers, and that transgressed constitutional limits, it is perhaps instructive to study how the first Democrats dealt with the opponents of Democracy.

As I reflect on the turbulence of those early days when freedom for the masses arose, I keep fixing on a single symbolic image. The guillotine.

This dramatic device, which neatly separated heads from bodies, was adopted by the French National Assembly at the suggestion of one of its members, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who believed that the legitimate purpose of execution was the ending of a life, not torturing the designated decedent. Under the king aristocrats had been executed by the axe, while common folk were subject to long, cruel procedures—being hanged, broken on the wheel, or burned at the stake.

Obviously we do not wish to return to such barbarous practices, but when dealing with the systematic abuse of one class by another, it might be worth considering the elimination of a determined, deeply entrenched conspiracy of criminals. We haven’t had such an action since the Nuremburg Trials, in which the Nazis were tried for crimes against humanity and many went to the gallows; but now, confronted with an illegal government which may prove to have resulted from a bureaucratic coup d’etat, a cabal which systematically ignored and perverted the most basic tenets of our system and which used the machinery of government to favor and enrich a certain class at the expense of all others, perhaps it is an opportune time to reintroduce capital punishment for crimes of capital.

How does one prevent a recurrence of the events which lead to the economic collapse of our country, an event which threatens global economic collapse and misery for billions? One must create an indelible impression that such behavior will not be tolerated. And how better to do this than to reintroduce the guillotine as a reminder that one class must never exploit another? Imagine the “Irish Maiden” set up on the steps of the Federal Reserve Bank down on Wall Street as the worst offenders in the recent history of white-collar crime are dealt with. Would Mr. Madoff’s head on a pike serve as a warning to investment bankers that we do not take Ponzi schemes lightly?

We live in a society where ghetto residents, unable to find legitimate work, are routinely handed jail sentences of decades for selling people drugs that they want. Meanwhile, executives whose crimes have repercussions for millions of people are routinely fined in amounts that are miniscule compared to the sums they have stolen or caused to vanish. I don’t think that we need to go as far as the French did in the late eighteenth century. After all, we have television, which will efficiently amplify the educational effect of such removals of criminal financiers and politicians. The Reign of Terror, which saw the execution of many thousands in France between 1793 and 1794, would hardly be necessary today. A few neo-Cons and a few top Wall Street criminals going under the blade would probably serve as adequate warning that we will never again tolerate this sort of looting on a mass scale.

Two or three guillotines would probably be enough. Perhaps one on Wall Street, one on the Mall in the District of Columbia, and another at Mount Rushmore would be enough. I quite like this guillotine bearing the Chanel logo designed by my friend, the artist Tom Sachs. Not only could we sell the advertising rights to a luxury company, but it would serve as a reminder to the greedy and unscrupulous that the path to luxury is fraught with peril if one wanders off the righteous path, and infringes on the paths of others—and that society has the right and power to curtail and correct such a course.