By Consent of the Corrupted

David Goldman (“Spengler”) is suitably appalled by the revelations of Peter Schweitzer’s Clinton Cash. But he seen enough of global corruption to put the onus where it belongs: “What kind of people are we Americans, that we allow these kleptocrat’s hirelings to persist in public life? The answer, I fear, is that we have become corrupt ourselves.”

There’s the fact that so many of us are paid off by the government. Goldman quotes Nicholas Eberstadt: “From 1940 to 1960, entitlement transfers accounted for under a third of federal spending. Today over two-thirds of federal spending goes to entitlements. In 2010 alone, governments at all levels oversaw a transfer of $2.2 trillion—three times as much as all military and defense spending that same year.”

There’s the large number of fraudulent mortgage applications: “The subprime scam of 1998-2008 corrupted a higher proportion of Americans than any economic phenomenon since slavery (and slavery, although wicked, was legal). Filing a false mortgage application is a felony, and millions of ordinary homeowners engaged in serious fraud during the peak years of the housing boom.”

In a sense, this demonstrates that that the system is working: “Democracy exists to give people the kind of government they deserve. If the American people do not have the moral fibre to extirpate corruption on the Clinton scale, they will deserve what’s coming to them.”

We can complain about corrupt politicians to our heart’s content. Goldman is right, though: The onus is on-us.