Power Corrupts

Frank T.

Lord Acton said, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This is brought to mind due to the recent arrest of Jack B. Johnson, Prince George’s County’s executive. The Washington Post says on their website that he and his wife were arrested for evidence tampering, destruction, and altering records. This event was set off by a phone call Leslie Johnson made to her husband telling him that people were at the house and he told her to destroy a check and hide the money. They arrested them after finding $76,000 in her underwear.

When I first glimpsed the headline I was thinking of the musician, and began wondering what he had done, but as soon as I saw it was some politician I lost interest. It is really a sad thing that we almost expect our politicians to break the law but vote them in the hope they will change our society for the better. History stands in support of the fact that our nation disintegrates more from politicians then from the common criminal.

Johnson apparently was taking money from an unknown source in order to push federal funding for housing projects in the county. One of these payments was a $100,000 check that his sweet wife Leslie flushed down the toilet, according to the FBI. What’s really fascinating is that it wasn’t ultimately Johnson who was the source of this but it was us, the common American people.

It has always been the American voter who is the source of horrible politics because we put that man or woman in power and we present that power on a silver platter in increasing amounts. If power corrupts then we need to make sure the men and women we place in leading roles don’t have too much of it, but hold on to it ourselves. With power being possessed by the millions that live in America no man has enough to be corrupted to his core.

But the question is how do we give or hold back power? As soon as you give a man your problems and he fixes them you are indebted to them. Because by handing over the problem you say, “I am unable of making the right choice so I am letting you make it for me.” And when someone is allowed to make the choice for you they now control a little bit of you.

The government has been allowed to control many facets of our lives. Even now they have taken health care, the choice to pay for a doctor, which is ultimately the choice of how you treat your body. If we are going to keep the corruption of power from the greedy hands of politicians we need to start tackling our problems by ourselves, rise up and take charge, apart from the government.

Why don’t we have more programs, set up by citizens, funded by citizens, to fix the issues at hand? We should have ways that make a government funded program, which parasitically saps the nation’s money, trivial and not needed. But no, we give that power to men who use it to improve their bank accounts.

Those we vote should only be given the power to protect our rights, not provide the means for us to live. “Power over a man’s subsistence is power over his will,” said Alexander Hamilton, the man who shaped America. No man can have my will because I give no man the right to my life.