Ethics in government

In the aftermath of the great Bob McDonnell scandal, our elected officials are spending hours and days discussing ethics reform. They are making it more complicated than it should be.

It is really very simple. If you are elected it is improper to take anything from anybody. If they didn’t give you Christmas presents BEFORE you were elected; you shouldn’t accept them now.

You were elected to serve the people. Any personal gain from your position is wrong. You get a paycheck. You get to play big shot. You have power, prestige and prominence. AND after you retire you get to use your knowledge and connections for your personal gain. Shouldn’t that be enough?

Ethics in business and Government is really a black and white issue as is personal integrity. It is an all or nothing proposition.

There is no difference between the guy who steals millions and the man I once watched steal a dime tip from a waitress. Both are thieves as is the Congressman or woman who sells his or her vote.

My son took a business ethics class in college. In it he observed that the so-called ethical dilemmas in business (and government) are nothing more than attempting to justify an unethical situation. His conclusion was if you have to ask if it is ethical it isn’t.

The same applies to limiting bribes, I mean donations, to elected officials. Attempting to draw a line or limit the size of donations or requiring disclosure is really saying “Our officials can be trusted not to sell their votes for a donation under this amount but we’re concerned that we can’t trust them if you offer them real money.”

Some people will sell their ethics (like the man stealing the waitress’s dime) cheaply. When you consider the number of our elected officials with small and negative net worth, we have a real problem.

As a side issue, if a man or woman can’t manage their own finances why would we elect them to manage ours anyway?

Every day I stop for coffee at a local restaurant and I read the counter newspaper. This is a service provided to customers by the restaurant. They buy a paper for the customers to read. It is good PR and good business.

On the other side I often see customers pick up a newspaper from the sales rack, read it and return it to the rack. These racks are ironically known as honor racks.

It appears some people don’t want to read a counter paper so they steal one. Remember we are selling the information, not just 24 blank pages of paper. I once asked a man how he justified stealing one of our competitor’s papers. He responded, “It’s not worth 50 cents.” I still don’t know if he was referring to the newspaper or his character.