The Real Culture Of Corruption

CONSERVATIVES have wonderful ideas—for education, for health care, and for income security. But you do not get elected on great ideas. Americans aren’t that interested in ideas. You get elected when the other guys screw up.

Conservative reform of education and Social Security will not happen through a free and fair discussion of the issues. It will happen because Americans get sick of pervasive liberal corruption in the public sector.

Last week we saw the institutional corruption reported at an ordinary community college in California.

Now here’s a story of corruption in a research university, reported in The New York Times. Reported by Jeneen Interlandi, it’s a story about a professor at the University of Vermont, convicted in federal court of

lying on a federal grant application and admitted to fabricating more than a decade’s worth of scientific data on obesity, menopause and aging.

What had Eric Poehlman done? Well, according to graduate student Walter DeNino, the whistleblower who had turned him in, Poelman had routinely altered data on clinical studies to make it support his hypotheses. So in a study of the change in fat levels in the blood over time, Poehlman just changed the data in a spreadsheet on which DeNino was working.

In the initial spreadsheet, many patients showed an increase in HDL from the first visit to the second. In the revised sheet, all patients showed a decrease. Astonished, DeNino read through the data again. Sure enough, the only numbers that hadn’t been changed were the ones that supported his hypothesis.

In this high-stakes research business where money, power and the roar of the crowd depend on a continuing flow of government research dollars we can assume that there is a lot of this kind of stuff going on.

Everyone agrees that the private sector is hopelessly compromised by its selfish pursuit of profit. Whereas university professors professors and government civil servants are all good guys.

But the Poehlman case shows how a committed cheater can elude detection for years by playing on the trust — and the self-interest — of his or her junior colleagues.

Before we can change the culture we have to discredit the incumbents. The American people have to grow to understand that “our” teachers, professors, doctors feeding in the public trough are all crooks and liars. You know, just like businessmen.

Then we can start to talk to them about reform.

Meanwhile former professor Eric Poehlman will be spending a year in jail.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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