Mark Levin keeps making the point that the lying that occurs in the public sector would be severely punished if it occurred in the private sector. If a board of directors, for example, distorted budget figures to try to create the appearance that there was less debt for a company than there was, the stockholders would rise up, prosecutors would be mobilized, and the perpetrators would end up in prison. If a CEO were to lie to customers in order to sell a new product, like Obama lied to the American people in order to get Obamacare passed, he would face a similar fate. Bernie Madoff invented an investment scheme in which he took money from some investors and used it to pay off other investors. The supposed investment money was never really invested but was simply recirculated. Kind of like Social Security. But while Madoff is doing a 150-year prison sentence, the perpetrators of the Social Security Ponzi scheme are held up to us as defenders of the middle class.
This partially explains why there is so much corruption and incompetence in government. You can get away with so much more in the political arena. Lies are free speech. Exploitation is rewarded with votes. And there is so much more power in the government sector – it has to be delicious to those who love power.
All this makes our founding that much more remarkable – that men who had the opportunity to seize power instead chose to craft an instrument that limited it. That instrument, the U.S. Constitution, served as a check on the corruption of power for many years. Now that it has been pretty much jettisoned, our country is in for some pretty rough times ahead.
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