One of the fastest and surest ways to recognize when a nation or an organization or an institution has gone corrupt is when its primary concern is to preserve its own gravy train without seeking to provide any kind of worthwhile service to other people. Sadly, evidence of such decadence and corruption is all around us. Most of us, myself included, do not have any trouble with people serving their own interests while they serve other people. I have no qualms with people who want to make a decent living as a public servant, or as a minister, or as a college professor, far from it. What I do have a problem is when someone thinks they are entitled to a decent living without doing anything of worth to earn that living, and I have an even bigger problem when they expect me to provide them with that living myself.

Let us consider the example of Nancy Pelosi, current minority leader of the United States House of Representatives and Democrat from the city of San Francisco. She and her husband purchased 5,000 shares of Visa in 2008 while a law regulating credit card companies was being discussed (she was speaker of the house at the time) at $44 a share. Within two days the price went up to $64 a share, netting her and her husband a tidy $100,000 in profit from insider trading, knowing that the law, which was to reduce credit card profits, was not going to pass for some time. It was passed only two years later [1]. Pelosi is far from the only member of Congress to profit from insider trading, and even more stunning is that such actions, while clearly corrupt, are not illegal because Congress has been unwilling to support a law that criminalizes one of their main sources of income, since apparently $174,000 per year isn’t enough to live off of.

Nor is Congress the only example where leaders have fiddled and diddled, profiting off of corruption while common people are in rather dire straits. Often people with a nostalgia for courts and their foppery cringe at the fate of the deposed French monarchs during the brutal French Revolution. Certainly the brutal revolutionaries of that time like Danton and Robespierre were cold-blooded fanatics of the worst kind. Nonetheless, the fact that nobles had been tax-exempt for over a century and the fact that the royal establishment lived luxuriously well while ordinary people eked out bare survival even while the nation itself struggled to keep up with the English suggested that something was amiss. We ought not to think the example of the French as anything special, if anything it is an ordinary and typical answer of the danger of populism for those whose wealth and whose benefits far outweigh their service to others.

I remember a similar example not too long ago. American Airlines, like almost all airlines, it seems, was struggling to stay out of bankruptcy and had negotiated a deal with its pilots and baggage handlers to reduce their salaries by an aggregate of $1.4 billion, and as soon as the deal was announced, a $700 million bonus was given to its CEO, who was lucky to escape a well-earned lynching. This is the sort of corruption that got the French monarchs killed, making others suffer in hard times while those in charge get massive bonuses paid for by the suffering of those common people or ordinary employees. This is the kind of episode that gives an ugly edge to populist demands for justice.

These examples of political and business corruption, which could be repeated ad infinitum, suggest that there is a potentially fatal disconnect between corrupt leaders who profit from their own connections and their own powerful positions and the ordinary people without such power or connections who suffer immensely and whose suffering pays for the benefits given to their corrupt leaders who have no interests in the good of those they rob and pillage. In these cynical times leaders gain the trust of others when they show themselves as taking a lead in sharing the hardships of those they lead, letting others know that there is nothing that a good leader will ask his (or her) people to suffer that he (or she) is not willing to endure as well. Only by so doing can leaders escape the (true) charge that they make rules and make life harder on others without lifting a finger themselves.

Such leaders are extremely difficult to find. All too often those people who lead simply have no idea the sort of life that their followers have. Whether this is a golf-playing minister who lives in the nicest parts of town while having only a bachelor’s degree from an unaccredited religious college who has never dealt with prolonged unemployment because they have hopped around from church to church when things looked tough even for a short while to companies who argue over favorable stock splits and profit sharing for themselves while slashing or holding their employees’ salaries for year after year, this is ordinary behavior among the leaders of our world. Leaders like to make the rules, enjoy the spoils, while others pay the price and suffer the consequences.

In large part to this corrupt behavior, there are calls for austerity worldwide that periodically result from overspending on entitlements. And yet calls for austerity almost inevitably mean that ordinary people who are already struggling simply have to struggle more. It seems we never get around to trimming the fat of the fat cats who generally profit off of corruption, whether as political, economic, or cultural elites. Again, people seek positions of power to profit from corruption and feather their own beds, and everyone else gets to fight over the scraps when hard times hit.

Some might call this logistical thinking, but others are inclined to view it less charitably. The Czechs throughout history have had a way of dealing with oppressive and brutal leaders throughout history that cries out for broader usage, the habit of defenestration. Since buildings (especially fancy homes) are commonly a way where corrupt elites like to show off their ill-gotten gains, a good defenestration is a way to remind them that their wealth and power and position are only secure when the people at large are able to live peacefully and well. The best way for leaders to ensure their own legitimacy and security is to help provide for the well-being of the people at large, to ensure opportunity for advancement and honorable places for as many people as possible. To do otherwise is to build your own gallows.

We must remember that such corruption is not a partisan problem, nor does it require a partisan solution. A big part of the problem is that a group of elites engages in corrupt behavior for mutual benefit–crony capitalism benefits “civil servants” who forget that they serve the people and not the interests they regulate while receiving bribes and kickbacks so that they do not do their jobs, companies who share the wealth with political leaders and who gain money in “bailouts” and contracts as a result of their political contracts (witness, for example, the bogus “green jobs” of the Solyndra scandal). Such crony capitalism thrives in a world of complicated laws, earmarks, and overregulation that commands winners and losers by government fiat and seeks to overthrow any kind of accountability to the public at large.
The fact that both corporations and government officials enjoy this arrangement suggests that the corruption runs very deep. Such corruption is hard to eradicate unless there are leaders prepared to govern in an honorable way from among we the people ourselves.

[1] http://www.redstate.com/governorperry/2012/01/05/stop-insider-trading-dead-in-its-tracks/