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Title: Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society by Peter W. Morgan, Glenn H. Reynolds ISBN: 0-7432-4266-1 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: If you thought you understood Watergate, READ THIS BOOK!
Comment: And if you ever wondered why there seems to be no accountability, READ THIS BOOK!
As Milton Friedman has pointed out, when government attempts to solve a problem, the solution is often worse than the problem itself. As "The Appearance of Impropriety" shows, when government was tasked with restoring integrity in government, the solution turned out to be an elaborate code of rules which, in effect, destroy integrity in order to save it!
As an attorney and a self-educated Watergate buff, I read all the whodunit books, explored countless "Deep Throat" theories, and read most of the standard Watergate tomes. Typically the period is portrayed as one in which America learned "hard lessons" in morality, then entered a "new era." During my college years I watched the morality play on television.
Eventually I realized the whole thing had been a triumph of hypocrisy masquerading as a triumph of morality, and I finally concluded that Watergate was a triumph of investigative journalism run amok. I was more cynical than most people even before I read this book, because I sensed that the "new", "more ethical" era was worse in a moral sense than the old era of corrupt backroom deals and cynical political skullduggery.
Authors Peter Morgan and Glenn Reynolds not only provided me with proof of my suspicions, but they demonstrate how the system the reformers created has come to rival the corruption of the past.
As they show, today's corruption is governed by an elaborate, appearance-based regulatory system in which compliance with the rules, by eliminating any real need for personal integrity, places honesty and integrity about on the level of compliance with such things as IRS codes or affirmative action quotas. Thus, the truly corrupt are enabled, and those with genuine integrity are burdened with humiliating and stultifying regulations which would keep many people away from public service. (As the authors note, Dwight Eisenhower was such a notorious rule breaker that it is doubtful that he could survive today's appearance-based scrutiny.)
Actual example of an ethics rule cited by the authors: "...[A] federal worker can legally accept pay for a "comic monologue" -- unless, that is, the government decides that the talk was actually an "amusing speech," in which case the federal worker could be fined $10,000 and drummed out of the service."
All of this and more can be traced to the post-Watergate explosion in ethics reform (a period the authors call "the Big Bang"). This has ended up deepening the entire country's cynicism, not by restoring integrity, but by creating a monstrous system of appearance-based regulations which encourage moralistic posing while actually undermining genuine integrity. Oddly enough, by exposing the appearance racket for what it is, this book offers hope to people (like me) who long since gave up. Integrity can still be made to matter, despite the cult of appearances enshrined since the Watergate Big Bang.
I am not out to rehabilitate Nixon, but were the fine insights of these authors juxtaposed alongside certain long-suppressed details of Watergate, additional light might be shed on why those who were out to get Nixon at all costs created a system of appearance-based "reforms" which ended up perpetuating the very thing they claimed to be ending. Those who "got" Nixon in my view ultimately had even more to hide than he did. They created a code for their times -- a code of appearances.
In the old days, an impropriety was an impropriety. Appearances were used to conceal improprieties, but with no real guarantee that anyone would be fooled. What was once a disguise has now become official certification that no impropriety exists.
When morality is defined as compliance with rules, true morality ceases.
Why didn't the government ever think of that?
Rating: 1
Summary: A Book Written on the Irony Board
Comment: One of the authors doesn't understand the issue and constantly confuses disclosure rules and conflict of interests.
Also since one of the authors has used false statements to support his own conclusions about the state of ethics and conflict laws -- that hardly makes for a believeable source.
This book is merely the reflection of people whose own ethics and understanding of civic corruption is in the toilet.
Rating: 5
Summary: A succinct explanation of our current political climate
Comment: When one reads this book, which presents a plethora of alternatively humorous, irritating and discouraging (sometimes, all at once) examples of what's defective with "appearance politics" in law, science, government and society, one comes away with a much better idea of why American political life is as inane and depressing as it has become in the '90s: it's just the logical development of a long line of struggles in which the vacuum of appearance has triumphed over the meatier and graver substance of reality. This book demands to be read by a wide audience, as it provides an entirely new perspective on some of the more troubling incidents in our recent political and societal history and how we have gotten there. There's probably a post-Clinton Administration sequel awaiting this for Messrs. Morgan and Reynolds to report, or at least, a updated second printing.
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Title: Scandal Proof: Do Ethics Laws Make Government Ethical by G. Calvin MacKenzie, Michael Hafken ISBN: 0815754035 Publisher: Brookings Institution Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Trembling in the Ivory Tower: Excesses in the Pursuit of Truth and Tenure by Kenneth Lasson ISBN: 1890862088 Publisher: Bancroft Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Starting and Managing a Nonprofit Organization : A Legal Guide by Bruce R. Hopkins ISBN: 047139727X Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: 08 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty by Randy Barnett ISBN: 0691115850 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $32.50 |
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Title: Strategic Planning for Nonprofit Organizations: A Practical Guide and Workbook by Michael Allison, Jude Kaye ISBN: 0471178322 Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: 14 July, 1997 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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