Corruption and scandals--a modest proposal.

• Date: 01 July 2012
• Author: Lister, Phil

Anyone who follows politics or even just reads the news knows that great political questions and issues of public philosophy often get set aside from the political agenda because of the intervention of scandals involving a few individuals. The media, and therefore the public, are focused on whether X did or did not pay/bed so and so. Can these scandals be prevented? I think some of them can and I have a modest proposal to make public life a lot less susceptible to allegations and royal commissions about one scandal or another.

Let's analyze scandals a bit. There are two basic types--money and sex. Well, sex is here to stay so I am not going to comment on that. Besides which, Canada hasn't had a good sex scandal since Gerda Munsinger in 1963, so let's leave those to the British (the French aren't very scandalized by anything sex-related anyway, and the Americans are so constantly being scandalized by one sex scandal after another that it gets to be boring). So I will focus on corruption and...