Reform of Government by addressing Conflicts of Interest

I saw an interesting article today. It plays into a concern that I have about modern government. Conflicts of interest.

As a lawyer who works on corporate issues both for businesses and charities and on estate planning trusts, I am intimately familiar with the concept of "conflicts of interest."

Since today's liberal society plays the concept of conflicts of interest as a club to batter Republicans with business experience and strong ideas (e.g., Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush in the prior lives running or owning oil businesses), Republicans are not comfortable using this claim against Democrats. Yet, the Democrats are some of the strongest users of conflicts of interest as political strengths. They have a very high proportion of their efforts done by union members whether trade, teacher, or government-employee unions.

The first thing these elected officials do is hire the partisans who placed them in office. Fine. Makes sense. Hire the reliable and similar thinking. That's good business. Why would it not be good office management, too?

But we have a severe problem growing in our society that Derbyshire in the above article only alludes to: the concentration of same thinking from a few unions. Think of it this way, how many union members are represented by the AFL-CIO president? How many managers are represented by the chairman of General Motors? Do GM, Ford, and Daimler Chrysler always agree?

How large a percentage of modern union membership is government employees? Why should these government employees be able to double dip in affecting your life. First, they make and enforce the rules you have to live by in paying taxes, the exhaust that emits from your car, the construction standards of your house, the working conditions of your business, the rules for how you withdraw money from your retirement plan, the rules for when your mother's nursing home is paid by government. These employees propose the government spending budgets, which always increase (even when we are told they have made cuts, a/k/a baseline budgeting). These same employees then get to organize as a union and make political demands from the government -- including active involvement in the elections process.

Don't get me wrong. Citizens voting makes sense. Government should enforce rules. However, the problem is the pervasive nature of the same people having so much voice being paid for by the other citizens.

In my world of law, conflicts of interest occur when the rights of one group require the rights of another group to come into conflict. For example, a member of a charity's board of directors cannot receive a grant from the charity of any significant size, otherwise the charity can be punished. A corporate board member cannot learn about a business opportunity at the board meeting and then start his own competing company to seize that business opportunity. To handle these conflicts of interest specific procedures are put into place. The usual means to resolve is to announce the conflict and take the person with the conflict of interest out of the decision-making process. The effect of not using the transparency is the board member can be punished and the company punished.

This system works well in small groups. It is difficult to apply on a governmental level. Yet, the idea is important. Transparency in these small groups is the key part of the process.

Government transparency is needed with these double-dipping unions. The default on these conflicts of interest need to be toward benefitting taxpayers when conflicts occur, rather than benefitting government employees.