Ding,ding,ding,ding! We have a winner!!!
Government unobserved very quickly starts to smell very bad. Often government only has to obfuscate their actions in plain sight to hide their actions. The City of Bell in Los Angeles is a prime example. Take an organization that is granted extraordinary powers, self regulated, and (when caught out) investigates itself and you have a recipe for disaster. The only protection that the public has to protect itself is to be able to observe in a meaningful manner the actions of the police.
Do you think that police are good and magically 'special' so they can be trusted? It is a pretty well excepted fact that a single person, observed, will tend to make choices that we would describe as moral simply because they are being observed. You put together a group of like minded people and then you can start to see really questionable behavior. When you get really large masses of people in a hierarchy then you can get truly obscene, despotic behavior. Question any police officer you know and you will find seeds of this. They have a culture ingrained with the idea that the laws don't really apply to them combined with equal parts of "they are a brotherhood that stands apart" and the fact that they investigate themselves.
Ask any police officer you know if they have chosen to not give a 'brother officer' a traffic citation simply because they are a police officer ("One of the brotherhood"). They will say things like "professional courtesy" and if pressed for a better reason will come up with something like, "I don't give them a ticket because this is someone that I might have to count on to back me up in an emergency situation at a moments notice". Really!??? The police officer's excuse breaks down to, "a policeman might be so unreliable and sophomoric to not pitch in during an emergency situation because someone gave them a traffic ticket"? I don't believe that answer for a minute even though the officer probably believes it, because it has been ingrained in him through the culture of his department and training.
Let's break it down:
- They can choose which laws apply to their brotherhood.
- They have a culture of protecting their own before they protect the public. (all people are this way)
- They are put in situations where on an average day they see the worst in humanity and the normal human thing to do is to anticipate/expect/look-for that behavior out of of every new person they meet.
- They have a culture of secrecy.
- And then they investigate themselves and only they can decide to send one of their own in front of a judge.
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Trust your government as far as you can spit upwind in a hurricane. A government unobserved is a recipe for tyranny... and the baking time till ready is almost instantaneous. Remember that Morality is a function of consciousness, and a government (or corporation) is not conscious so it cannot make moral choices. They may appear moral or the actions may agree with your moral choices but that doesn't make them moral choices.
It is actually just a big process populated by people wanting to justify their own positions and to a large part by people who think citizens are accountable to 'The Process instead of the other way around. A big thing to look for are governments that think that the constituents are their source of revenue. This tells you what the people at the top think the relationship is. And everyone else in the hierarchy is sucking from the teat above them so you know how the Kool-Aid is distributed.
