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Politicians And Bureaucrats Have Created A Simmering Distrust In Our Institutions. Maybe It’s Coming To A Boil.

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Amid the dueling claims and information chaos in the wake of Election Day 2020, we’re seeing the consequence of the loss of faith in our basic institutions by at least half of the American public. These Americans have seen stark, specific examples in recent years of how justice is not equally applied.

They have watched as some federal agents and officials of the intelligence community, who should be helping to protect us and to uphold the laws, instead have embarked upon propaganda campaigns and operations that involved committing shocking violations and potential crimes, such as conducting illegal spying, filing improper wiretap applications, unmasking the protected names of innocent U.S. citizens, engaging in illegal leaks of confidential or classified information, and destroying evidence and documents. These lapses didn’t just happen during the 2016 presidential election; there is evidence they have been going on for years, unmitigated.

These Americans have watched, too, as those within our institutions, who are in a position to hold the guilty parties accountable, have failed to do so even as the evidence poured in and as the weeks, months and years have dragged on.

They have witnessed many of the institutions encompassing the nation’s media, social media and the internet getting away with increasingly offensive, restrictive censorship of certain people and certain thoughts — making sure that we don’t see some information and views while forcing other views down our throats, including one-sided false narratives and claims.

And these Americans have seen some of our courts co-opted and used as tools to stop certain politicians and policies.

It should be of little surprise, then, that this loss of faith in our basic institutions now extends to our election system. Americans know that the key to finding the truth lies in the hands of the very players who have proven to be so conflicted, incompetent and, at times, dishonest in the recent past.

The same pundits, analysts and news outlets that got 2016 so wrong and then followed a one-dimensional, biased path down the road to supposed Russia collusion only to be proven wildly wrong — the same folks who never apologized or self-corrected for their egregious errors then — are now reporting on the 2020 presidential election. We’re counting on them to do journalistic investigations and to find the facts.

The Department of Justice is relied upon to help identify and prosecute election fraud. We turn to the courts to arbitrate disputes over ballots and counts. We use the internet to find facts and information about all of it.

In short, the sources we now rely on most under the current scenario are some of the same ones who have spent the better part of the past four years apparently breaking rules and sometimes committing crimes to try to oust President Trump. Whatever turns out to be the case in the end, to suggest that it’s crazy or off-base to suspect any sort of conspiracy against Donald Trump is, itself, the irrational thought. People wouldn’t be thinking logically if they didn’t at least explore the possibility that there might be those willing to cross lines to keep Trump from getting reelected. 

Those who are suspicious are not the ones to blame for their lack of confidence in all of the institutions involved. They’re simply learning from experience.

Sharyl Attkisson is an Emmy-winning investigative journalist, author of the upcoming “Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism,”

Government Corruption Extends Far Beyond What Politicians Admit.

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Allegations of corruption have recently been levied against Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau (since resigned) for not recusing themselves from discussions about awarding a contract to a charity which has financial ties to their families.

Notice that the wrongful act—corruption—is completely focused on the names of the state’s decision-makers, not on the actual decisions. Thus, the purpose of the state’s rules is to create a perception of legitimacy for state activities so long as the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats remains within the boundaries which they define. Moreover, these boundaries do not consider the collecting and spending of taxpayers’ money, per se, to be an act of corruption.

The definition of corruption from Merriam-Webster (emphasis added): dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers).

Now let’s consider some things which we’re told are totally not corrupt and perfectly fine.

The state monopolizes the provision of police and judicial services. These bureaucracies are enriched, yet they fail to solve a majority of violent crimes. But the state refuses to return any of the tax dollars—tax dollars taken by coercive means—to citizens, as compensation for its failure to provide all of the services it promised in exchange for those tax dollars.

In Canada, the state implemented universal healthcare with a dishonest claim that this was necessary because many poor people lacked access to healthcare. Healthcare bureaucracies have been enriched, as healthcare has become the largest item in provincial budgets. However, once again, the state refuses to return any of the stolen tax dollars to citizens as compensation for its failure to provide all of the healthcare services it promised.

And then there is the usual political lobbying process in which interest groups provide “campaign contributions” to politicians in exchange for political favors.

This, of course, could easily be called bribery, although politicians have defined it as perfectly legal.

Part and parcel of all this is the state’s regulatory apparatus (of similar magnitude in Canada as in the US on a per capita basis), which supposedly exists to protect the safety and welfare of consumers from unscrupulous corporations. Yet somehow the regulatory machine manages to affect a massive transfer of wealth from workers and consumers to politically influential corporations. Thus, the 1 percent gains at the expense of the 99 percent, thanks to the politicians who are on the receiving ends of these legal bribes.

Those are just a few of the thousands of examples of state corruption, which Frédéric Bastiat refers to as legal plunder.

We must not allow the state, and its sanctimonious cheerleaders in the mainstream media, to bastardize the definition of the word “corruption.” If Justin Trudeau, Bill Morneau, and all the other politicians and bureaucrats start “obeying the rules,” this does not eliminate corruption. These rule breakers are not the problem. They are merely symptoms of the disease. The disease is legalized corruption, with the state’s forced taxation, complete lack of accountability, and its predisposition to grant itself legitimacy through democratic elections every four years. As Albert Jay Nock wrote:

The interests of the State and the interests of society…are directly opposed.

The State is not…a social institution administered in an anti‑social way. It is an anti‑social institution.

State power has an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or honestly. (emphasis added)

The truth is that those who are tasked with serving the public interest are well positioned to serve whatever interests they choose because the rules they create to control their own behavior are far too lax. And why wouldn’t they be lax? When state officials have the power to make their own rules, you can be sure they will give themselves wide latitude.

The Bigger The Government, The Greater The Corruption. Bernie Sanders Is Looking To Double It.

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Front-runner Bernie Sanders portrays himself as the antidote to corruption in Washington. But his own policies guarantee it will vastly increase.

“We will transform our political system by rejecting the influence of big corporate money,” Sanders said when he released his sweeping anti-corruption plan last fall. It includes such things as bans on lobbying, mandatory taxpayer financing of elections and a constitutional amendment restricting free speech.

But at the same time, Sanders’ spending spree would more than double the size of the federal government. He’s proposed free health care, free college, free daycare, guaranteed jobs, a “green new deal.”

When we added up the proposals he’d made, it came to almost $6 trillion in new spending each year. That was as of last August. Sanders has added to his spending plans since then.

Sanders would more than double the size of the federal government when it comes to spending. On Monday, he released some details on where he’d get the money, which include gargantuan tax hikes on everyone, including the middle class. There’s no telling what he’d do to expand the federal government’s regulatory state, but his ambitions there seem limitless.

The result would be to strip Americans of many of the freedoms we currently enjoy in the name of “fairness,” while turning millions into wards of the state.

His policies would also explode the amount of corruption in this country, no matter how many new rules he tries to impose on lobbyists or how many free speech rights he takes away from campaign contributors.

If there’s one thing that should be clear to clean government zealots, it’s that the bigger the government, the greater the corruption.

As we noted in this space recently, there are a number of studies making this connection. One found that the size of government “does indeed have a strong positive influence on corruption.”

Harvard law professor Matthew Stephenson looked at several others and found that “Within the U.S., when controlling for a number of other economic and demographic factors, states with larger public sectors seem to have higher corruption.”

We also pointed out that there is a nearly exact correlation between spending by the federal government and spending by lobbyists. (See the chart below.)

You simply can’t have more spending without generating more lobbying, for the simple reason that the bigger the government, the bigger the return for lobbyists who win government favors.

Conversely, the more economic freedom a country enjoys, the less corruption exists.

Writing in Forbes, Alejandro Chafuen plotted countries in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, which measures 180 countries across several measures of economic freedom, from labor laws, tax rates, trade, property rights, national debt, and so on. Chafuen then did the same with Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, which ranks countries based on “perceived levels of public sector corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys.”

Chafuen found that the correlation between freedom and corruption is “strong and significant.” The greater the economic freedom, the lower the corruption. Less economic freedom – the kind that Sanders is eager to impose in the U.S. – the greater the corruption.

“Economic freedom is a major deterrent to corruption,” says Chafuen, who has been studying this relationship for decades.

“Based on the study results over the last 25 years, I feel confident concluding that leaders who fight corruption with more regulations rather than with true economic freedom are comparable to those who want to fight fires with gasoline: purposefully ignorant or willful accomplices.”

Sanders should know this connection exists from personal experience. As Peter Schweizer details in his new book – “Profiles in Corruption” – Sanders has been using his position as a “public servant” to funnel money to his family and friends.

“There are various ways taxpayer money, school money, other things that have flowed to the family and have made the Sanders family very, very wealthy,” he told Fox News.

The Heritage index meanwhile, shows a direct correlation between economic freedom and prosperity.

“The ideals of economic freedom are strongly associated with healthier societies, cleaner environments, greater per capita wealth, human development, democracy, and poverty elimination,” the report says.

In other words, everything that Sanders says he wants to achieve would be undermined by his socialist policies. There would be less prosperity, more poverty, a worse environment, less democracy … and far more corruption. Don’t believe so? Take a trip to Venezuela and see for yourself.

— Written by John Merline for Issues and Insights

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