America’s “Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy”: Part I

Earlier this year, I asked “Why are there so many bad and corrupt people in government?” and suggested two possible explanations.

1. Shallow, insecure, and power-hungry people are drawn to politics because they want to control the lives of others.
2. Good people run for political office, but then slowly but surely get corrupted because of “public choice” incentives.

I’m sure both answers apply to some extent. But let’s consider whether one answer is more accurate in more cases?

In an article for Quillette, Professor Crispin Sartwell of Dickinson College looks at this chicken-or-egg issue of whether people are corrupted by government or corrupt people gravitate to government.

“Power corrupts,” as the saying goes, and a corollary is that, other things being equal, the more power, the more corruption. …But perhaps the explanation runs the other way: It’s not only or not even primarily that power corrupts, but that corrupt people seek power, and the most effectively corrupt are likeliest to succeed in their quest. …That is, it is likely that a political career would attract moral corner-cutters. …There may be a certain percentage of people who seek power because they want to do good, or it may be that in the back of their minds, every political leader believes that he intends to do good. But to use power to do good, you’ll have to do whatever’s necessary to get that power. You’ll likely have to compromise whatever basic moral principles (“tell the truth,” for example) you came in with. …political power is a constant temptation to hypocrisy, or just flatly demands it. And when the public persona and the private reality come apart, a human being becomes a moral disaster, a mere deception. That is a fate common among politicians.

Professor Sartwell may not have a firm answer, but one obvious conclusion is that good people will be scarce in Washington.

And it’s not just the politicians we should worry about. The whole town seems to attract dodgy people.

In a 2018 study, Professor Ryan Murphy of Southern Methodist University found that Washington has far more psychopaths than any other part of the country.

Psychopathy, one of the “dark triad” of personality characteristics predicting antisocial behavior, is an important finding in psychology relevant for all social sciences. …While a very small percentage of individuals in any given state may actually be true psychopaths, the level of psychopathy present, on average, within an aggregate population (i.e., not simply the low percentages of psychopaths) is a distinct research question. …The most extreme data point is the District of Columbia, which received a standardized score of 3.48. …The presence of psychopaths in District of Columbia is consistent with the conjecture found in Murphy (2016) that psychopaths are likely to be effective in the political sphere. …The District of Columbia is measured to be far more psychopathic than any individual state in the country, a fact that can be readily explained…by the type of person who may be drawn a literal seat of power.

Moreover, we know that the crowd in D.C. figuratively screws taxpayers, but it appears they’re also busy screwing in other ways.

Residents in Washington, D.C. have the highest rates of sexually transmitted disease, compared to 50 states, according to a recent Center for Disease Control and Prevention report. Out of the four kinds of STDs that the CDC report identified – chlamydia, gonorrhea, primary and secondary syphilis and congenital syphilis – the district scored No.1 in the first three by a large margin… For every 100,000 D.C. residents, 1,083 cases of chlamydia were reported. Alaska came in second with only 772 cases. Similarly, the district had 480 cases of gonorrhea per 100,000 population, double the rate of Mississippi, which ranked second.

Since this report was based on data in 2016, it’s possible another state has overtaken D.C.

But given Washington’s big lead, that would take a lot of risky extracurricular activity.

This tweet caught my eye because it nicely captures how the “experienced” people in Washington often may be the worst of the worst.

Amateur politicians do unethical things that are against the rules.

Professional politicians do unethical things that they've written the rules to allow.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) March 6, 2019

And we’ll close with this quote, which comes down on the side of bad people naturally gravitating to government.

P.S. If you like mocking the political class, you can read about how the buffoons in DC spend their time screwing us and wasting our money. We also have some examples of what people in Montana, Louisiana, Nevada, and Wyoming think about big-spending politicians. This little girl has a succinct message for our political masters, here are a couple of good images capturing the relationship between politicians and taxpayers, and here is a somewhat off-color Little Johnny joke. Speaking of risqué humor, here’s a portrayal of a politician and lobbyist interacting. Returning to G-rated material, you can read about the blind rabbit who finds a politician. And everyone enjoys political satire, as can be found in these excerpts from the always popular Dave Barry. Let’s not forgot to include this joke by doctors about the crowd in Washington. And last but not least, here’s the motivational motto of the average politician.