Post #14

Everyone has had the thought of suddenly acquiring huge sums of money at some point in their lives. The choice that we are told to make is to turn the money in to the police, but that is a very difficult thing to do. The $4 million that Hank, Lou and Jacob find was clearly obtained in some illegal way, and as we learned later it was in fact ransom money. Though the risks are present, people tend to focus only on the potential positive outcomes and avoid the negative ones. Hank brings up the fact that they could all go to jail, but then makes the decision to keep the money. When he asks his wife what she would do in the situation, she says she would return it; until she sees the money for herself. She then becomes the mastermind of the entire operation, the one who comes up with the most clever ways of hiding the paper trail. However, if it were me in that situation, I would take the money. I admit that I would have no qualms about whether it was "right" or "wrong", but only if I could get caught. I would have immediately left the country and bought a home on a Caribbean island. Yet if I were to encounter the money later in life, or if I had a happy and loving family (as Hank does), I might turned the money in. At the beginning of the film he even says that he didn't realize it at the time, but he was generally happy. The decision depends both on the person and the specific situation that the money is discovered.