It would be hard to find a single American who thinks our government works exactly the way it is supposed to. It might work the way some want it, but they know in their hearts that is not the way it should. So, why do we put up with it?
The short answer is because there are a group of people who benefit tremendously from it remaining about the way it is, and they have the system so rigged in their favor it doesn’t really matter what we, the general public/average Americans, want. These system-riggers want only small changes, and those changes almost universally work for them and/or their clients.. But why has it even gotten to this point?
This little blurb is about one aspect of the current situation: the people we select to make our laws and run our government departments. The members of the congress, presidents, and cabinet members are overwhelmingly drawn from two career paths: the legal profession and business/finance. If you paint each path with a broad brush, it would be hard to find two professions where ethics take more of a backseat.
Lawyers certainly purport to be after truth and justice, but we know justice and truth are often the last things on their minds. They are working first and foremost in their clients’ best interests, and their ultimate goal is always winning. I hope you have been paying attention to the revelations about prosecutorial misconduct over the past few years: suppressing exculpatory evidence, using confessions made under unfair distress, refusing to rehear cases where exonerating evidence has clearly been found, etc. Yet, one of the big selling points of anyone running for office for the last 40 years has been the former prosecutor who is “tough on crime.” The win at all costs ethics of the legal profession rolls right into our modern government, where no one will compromise, where the “client” they want to win is not the American people but the lobbyists and campaign contributors. The legal path public servants also dedicate much of their efforts to opacity of language and terminology in order to perpetuate their place of importance.
Businesspersons choose a challenging path. They have an idea or goal and try to make it a reality. They usually must hire workers to help them achieve their goals, but they then encounter two ethical dilemmas they usually fail to decide well on: the less they pay the workers, the more of the money they get to keep; the more they charge for the product, the more money they make. While there are certainly fair and honest businesses, these constant dilemmas overwhelmingly result in ethical compromises and justifications for the most successful. Many of these ethically compromised people then move into government, and they conflate capitalism with patriotism and prefer to run the country in a way to benefit businesses of every sort over the workers and consumers. They fight workplace safety regulations, minimum wage increases, labor organization, and are always in search of competitive advantages in the laws, especially with regards to taxes for businesses.
I kept finance separate from business, as their roles are fundamentally different despite their goals being similar. You are going to see more of them in the cabinet, as they are otherwise unlikely to take a pay cut that immense to be a congressperson, though they will gun for a senate seat from time to time, as they can wield significant power in the Senate and easily recoup the chunks of their fortunes they commit to win an election. The rule, with few exceptions, in finance, is winner take all. There is likely no line of work with more contempt for the common worker. They have rigged it so people who move money, which is now just a bunch of ones and zeroes, around, get the most money of anyone, and they definitely want to keep it that way. As Calvin Trillon drolly observed, before the 1980s, the middle of the pack students at Yale and the other Ivies, who only got into the schools because their fathers attended and continued to donate, were the ones who followed their parents or other relatives into finance. It was boring, though you could make a decent living. That has changed with the liberalization of what it is now possible and the vagueness of the current regulations that allows firms to bring in mathematicians and the smart kids who used to go into the law or medicine (in order to make money, rather than help people) to ramp up the complexity of everything so no one can understand it (even them). They have a lot of the money, and when we say markets go up and down, money is always flowing to them either way (it doesn’t just vanish when it is lost - it moves into someone’s account).
The result is a government run by a few hundred people on behalf of a few thousand others with each of us picking up the tab, which has mostly been borrowed. It is stunning to see how much effort will go into making one or two businesspersons happy, while millions of others are just scraping by in perilous and unrewarding jobs (think of coal mine owners, for example). This same principle is also playing out in state and local governments, who allow businesses (for example, Frackers) to come in, rape and pillage the environment and endanger the communities and their employees along the way, while only creating a small fraction of the jobs they promise and hiding behind immense legal teams to protect them once their misdeeds come to light. It is encouraging more and more people are onto this, and leaders like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was never anything but a worker, are growing in influence and popularity and are unafraid to confront the realities of this system and try to tear it down and build something that will work best for all. We need way more of them and to vote for people like them who can make progress for us.