Where Are We Going As A Country?

On Sunday, Glenn Reynolds posted an article in USA Today entitled, “When leaders cheat, followers…follow.” That is not good news considering the current state of affairs in America.

The article reminds us:

I wonder more when I read things like this report from the Washington Examiner: “The CIA’s inspector general is claiming it inadvertently destroyed its only copy of a classified, three-volume Senate report on torture, prompting a leading senator to ask for reassurance that it was in fact ‘an accident.’”

Here’s a hint: It very likely wasn’t.

…Then there’s Hillary’s email scandal, in which emails kept on a private unsecure server — presumably to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures — were deleted. Now emails from Hillary’s IT guy, who is believed to have set up the server, have gone poof.

“Destroy the evidence, and you’ve got it made,” said an old frozen dinner commercial. But now that appears to be the motto of the United States government.

So this leads to the question:

So why do the rest of us bother to obey the law? And, yes, that’s an increasingly serious question.

The article describes America as currently a high-trust society. Glenn Reynolds defines that as a place where people extend trust to strangers and follow rules for the most part even when nobody is watching. He defines a low-trust society as a place where trust seldom extends beyond close family, and everybody cheats if they can get away with it.

The article concludes:

High-trust societies are much nicer places to live than low-trust ones. But a fish rots from the head and the head of our society is looking pretty rotten. As Lira (Gonzalo Lira, an American novelist and filmmaker) says, “I’m like Wayne Gretsky: I don’t concern myself with where the puck has been — I look for where the puck is going to be.” Where will our society be in a decade if these trends continue? And what can we do to ensure that they don’t?

If the coming Presidential election is won by a Republican, will the IRS scandal, Fast and Furious, the email scandal, the Clinton Foundation, etc. be investigated? I don’t know, but an honest investigation might restore some of the trust in our government.