Quote of the Day: Accountability

It's hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. – Thomas Sowell

One of the great failings of today's federal government is the lack of accountability of those who run it. Through at least the 1960s, and somewhat into the 1970s, if a government official screwed up big time, he (or she, but mainly he back then) resigned. If they did not, they were fired.

During World War II the US Army and Navy went through flag officers like tissue paper. When the US entered the war, Marshall replaced most of the Army's pre-war generals with younger men, typically colonels and lt. colonels. If the replacements did well, they were promoted. If they screwed up, they were replaced. Admiral King did the same in the US Navy. Competence counted. We won that war.

The Civil Service was much the same during the '40s and '50s. The incompetents were handed walking papers. Those of ability rose. Not always, but more often than not and frequently enough.

In the 1960s that began to change. Failures were not relieved. They were kicked upstairs. Promoted. It had also spread to industry and business. The Peter Principle emerged by the late 1960s.

In the private sector this led to spectacular crashes in the 1970s, most notably in the auto industry. Things corrected somewhat. Competition and creative destruction have a way of doing that in the private sector. Not so in government. The CYA trend and protect-your-buddy trend continued there because there was no real corrective mechanism. Government, especially its civilian sector, got worse and worse.

(The military was somewhat protected from this trend because through the victory in the Gulf War it was unpopular. Since it was not a prize, it was allowed to correct itself. Men like Creighton Abrams were allowed to fix it. After we won the Gulf War the bureaucrats realized there was gold in those hills, and the politically correct began burrowing in.)

I first really noticed it after the Challenger Disaster in 1986. Everyone culpable was promoted. The old saw of "search for the guilty, punish the innocent, and rewards for the uninvolved" kicked in. Since then, especially in government, things have gotten worse and worse. Destroy cities through absurd policy decisions. Get promoted. Poison a river in Colorado? Punish those in the private sector who could not override bad government decisions and reward those in government whose mistakes led to folly. And so on.

Incompetents rose to the top like cream, because incompetents only feel secure hiring those more incompetent than themselves. We get progressions like Obama to Biden to Harris to Walz. Over the last 20 years no one in government has been held accountable for anything.

That era appears to be over. People in the federal government are being fired for their failures. They are beginning to be held to account. I say beginning because the process started only one month ago. That is time enough for firings — and only a few firings — but not time enough for well-merited indictments, especially if those indictments are to be based on law, not vengeance. The process has been so long delayed that some good people will go out as well. For that I refer them to Aesop's fable of "The Farmer and the Stork."

Sowell is right. Power without accountability is madness. In a real sense, it is not power that corrupts. It is power without accountability that is truly corrupting.

(David Deeble referenced Thomas Sowell today, so I thought I might provide an offering of Sowell food for thought today. Sowell is who I want to be when I grow up.)