When I write about “government corruption” I usually mean one of three things:
- Government personnel breaking their public trust and “working for themselves,” as in taking kick-backs and the like. You know, like Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.) taking $2.3 million in bribes, and Hillary Clinton’s cattle future trades of a generation ago. This is what most people mean by corruption.
- Judgment and behavior modified by the practice of or access to power. In recent times, police have been engaging in SWAT team exercises, shooting innocents “by accident,” dogs on purpose — heart-rending examples of Lord Acton’s “power corrupts” maxim.
- Ideological corruption, whereby folks change their ideas — including abandoning principles — to fit into their new “class interest.” A balanced-budget talking, pro-term-limits politician enters office and Lo, a few years later, all he’s “learned” would be a shame to waste outside of office and every spending proposal deserves his vote.
But then there’s crazy stuff.
Environmental Protection Agency “Management for Region 8 in Denver, Colo., wrote an email earlier this year to all staff in the area pleading with them to stop inappropriate bathroom behavior, including defecating in the hallway.”
That’s according to Government Executive’s article “EPA Employees Told to Stop Pooping in the Hallway.”
Seriously.
Brian Doherty, at Reason, quipped that environmental bureaucrats “are just like us! If we like to leave feces around the hallways of our offices, that is.”
It’s a disgusting whiff of . . . something very rotten in the halls of government.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “Corruption Reeks”
I love Nigel Farage. If you’ve never heard him he is very common sense and has built a political party, UKIP, from scratch and out placed the establishment parties in local elections last month.
He’s proposing “Direct Democracy”.
My son, the political science graduate, says people can’t vote on every issue and it’s unworkable. I don’t understand why not:
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-27973093
A wonderful speaker, a former commodities trader who can mesh economics with politics and truly gets it with respect to the bureaucratic and unelected takeover of the European continent by the EU…really, what our bureaucracy is doing to us.
Anyway, why not Direct Democracy?
Rick,
Ross Perot, 9 the first time he ran for President-when he was taken somewhat seriously) proposed the same thing-re-voting- and the Internet was not as it is now. It was much less sophisticated.
there would be problems of fraud, but we have those in voting all of the time (see Chicago, any election; Texas 1960, etc). (The dead voting, and almost always for liberal democrats).
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RE: Feces in the hallways.
I WISH THAT WERE ALL THE EPA AND ITS STAFF WOULD DO. THE COUNTRY WOULD BE BETTER OFF.
Friday LOL. Thanks.
Rick, you ask “Why not direct democracy?”
Is there anything wrong with a majority voting that anyone originally named Rick will have to pay 80% of their income in taxes?
How many people will bother to vote on a rule increasing the wages for barbers working in a barber shop they do not own, to $30/hour? How many barbers will? Any problem with that?
Will individuals get to propose bills on which to vote, or will there be a limited number of bills, and how much time will this take for the average citizen?
I think representative democracy, limited to laws that don’t violate individual freedoms, is about as good as system as we have.
>>”I think representative democracy, limited to laws that don’t violate individual freedoms, is about as good as system as we have”.
I would guess that the “limited to laws that don’t violate individual freedoms” part would be the case whether you had representative democracy OR direct democracy, no?