Among other things, Goldberg discusses some shady dealings with respect to the current Chrysler debacle. (A tragedy in the making as described in this WSJ article by Holman W. Jenkins. One of Chrysler’s creditors describes in this NYTimes article how Obama administration officials tried to use hardball tactics to fleece his company in order to pay off political donors.)
Goldberg then writes, “If a Republican administration, staffed with cronies from Goldman Sachs and Citibank, were cutting special deals for its political allies ….” Whoa, he couldn’t be talking about the likes of Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, could he?
Finally, after ripping on Dems, Goldberg sounds a note of bipartisanship, writing that “political corruption is inevitable whenever you give hacks — of either party — too much discretion over public funds.”
And therein, my friends, lies the crux of the matter. Goldberg’s rant may seem a bit overly partisan to some. The fact is that when the government controls such a large slice of the economy, thuggish political opportunists will rise to take as much advantage as possible, regardless of which party of crooks is running the show.
The more money that is involved, the greater will be the corruption. This is human nature. More to the point, it is the nature of politicians. Americans by and large simply accept such sleaze as the way things happen to work in our system. Occasionally egregious underhandedness raises the public ire until it passes from the news cycle. And then the corruption cycle returns to normal.
This is one reason that some Americans favor limited government. The less government has its fingers in the economy, the less political corruption there will be.
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