by Rick Lowe

"Honesty is more than a moral principle. It is also a major economic factor. While government can do little to create honesty directly, in various ways it can indirectly either support or undermine the traditions on which honest conduct is based”. Thomas Sowell in "Basic Economics," 4th ed. (2010)

One must wonder if the chairman of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) takes his role as a political leader seriously when he calls the method used by the Auditor General in determining losses at the Road Traffic Department (RTD) into question. More…

To cast aspersions when his sincere concerns and plan to resolve the major problem of theft at the RTD should be expressed, he resorts to spitting in the face of accountability and transparency. A path he and some of his colleagues seem most comfortable with.

Even worse is the substantive Minister Glenys Hanna Martin has not yet offered any serious reason to believe anything will be done about the theft, other than blaming the paper (manual) system, as if computers will solve a theft problem. Comments suggesting this is unacceptable behaviour seem to have been left out of her speech intentionally. More…

Not to mention the blame game that the governing party has resorted to. Do they need to be reminded they are in control of these things?

Equally disturbing in all this is the silence of the Prime Minister, the country's political leader, who bears the ultimate responsibility.

The only reasoned response so far has come from the Controller of the RTD who said he will be setting the foundation for a creative action plan after meeting with officials of the Auditor General’s Department.

This sneering at, and undermining the institutions of ethics and morality by the political leadership condemns us to more of the same and then the added burden of more tax increases to compensate for this madness.

In a recent article about her new book, Bourgeois Equality, Professor Deirdre McCloskey puts this all rather succinctly:

“…An institution works well not merely because of good official rules of the game, beloved of economists, "incentives." An institution works, if it does, mainly because of the good ethics of its participants, intrinsic motivations powerfully reinforced by the ethical opinion people have of each other. A society can craft an official rule against cheating in business, a good institution. Yet if the rule is enforced with a nudge and a wink among people who ignore simple honesty or who sneer at the very language of ethics, and who are not effectively condemned by the rest of society for doing so—as in a corrupt Chicago during the 1890s or in a corrupt Shanghai during the 1990s—the economy won't work as well as it could.” More…

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Read a brief history of the Auditor General here…

Hat tip to Mr. Lawrence Reed for the Thomas Sowell quote.