Power is corrupting, period
There are no exceptions
The course was POD (Problems of Democracy). The teacher was exasperated. I was confused. Eleven years of public school didn’t explain the philosophy of the US government and now that the different branches, levels, parties, and coalitions were diagramed before me, the system seemed too complex to function. The problem was, the teacher was an adult and I wasn’t.
There are some things that can only be learned with age. Human nature is one of them. It is corruptible in ways large and small, subtle and obvious, intentional and inadvertent. The men that founded our country knew this. They understood that men are corruptible and thus the institutions they create will be corrupted. By creating many different and competing government entities the corruption could be fire walled. More importantly, the various parts of the government were supposed to compete with one another. The system is overly complicated and inefficient by design.
What the founders didn’t count on was the professional politician. If they knew that extended life expectancy would breed the callow, self-serving, gasbags that currently afflict us, I believe that they would have subjected all politicians to a Logan’s Run style Lastday. The propensity for corruption makes incumbency a disease. Term limits would be a reasonable cure short of forcing politicians to drink hemlock after they overstayed their welcome. Don’t expect the media to go along with them though. They only think corruption affects business people. Besides, learning to work with new people every eight years would tax their intellect.
Ultimately we depend on an adversarial system on many levels to protect us from endemic corruption. The cooperation of the political parties, branches of government, levels of government, and the press and government are not positive developments. That was the point of POD. Just thought you might want to know.