There Aught to be a Law!

This morning CSPAN replayed the Congressional hearings on the GSA scandal from earlier in the week.  It was both disturbing and amusing at the same time.  As the Republican members expressed their displeasure over the conduct of these civil servants, and got on their soapboxes with the moral indignation of someone who has only the taxpayers best interests at heart, the Democrats too expressed astonishment over the callous way these high-ranking career civil servants had squandered “other peoples money.”  These are the same politicians who cannot agree on a balanced budget, and think nothing of adding a $2M mark for a pet project to a funding bill!  Now that is funny stuff.

I am sure a new round of legislation, regulation, mandatory reporting, and new layers of lawyer oversight will be implemented so these violations of public trust will “NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN!” When we decide it is wrong to teach morality, when we allow everyone to believe they can do whatever they want and there will be no repercussion how can this not happen again?  You cannot build an ever-larger government without expecting ever-larger scandal from lower and lower levels of the bureaucracy.  At least not until robots replace all the civil servants, and then we have to worry about one of them violating Asimov's first law.