Conflicts

Is political deal-making a government ethics violation? This is a tough area. Government ethics is about the conflict of personal and public interests. Political interests are generally left out of the equation unless non-political benefits are involved. In politics, you are allowed to put your personal interests first, at least until you win.

According to an article in yesterday's Atlanta ...

 A few days ago, I wrote a blog post about how several government officials in Wausau mishandled a conflict situation involving the purchase of property fixed up with an interest-free loan from HUD. Yesterday's The State of South Carolina covers two other HUD loan conflict situations in Columbia, which are...

Global Ethics, an organization run by Rushworth Kidder, author of Moral Courage and other books, has a good Ethics Newsline, which you can subscribe to. His lead article this week is about government ethics awards, inspired by what happened in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa.

David Brooks' column in the New York Times today is about two views of character, the philosophers' and psychologists' views. He too simply portrays the philosophers' view as involving ingrained character traits, which is sadly how most people seem to view character. I would call this the mythological view of character.

The psychologists' view of character involves a "multiplicity of tendencies .....

One problem in government ethics is that when conflict situations are dealt with responsibly, there is rarely a record of them. They pass quietly, failing to end up in the newspaper, at an ethics commission, or in court. So generally we're stuck learning from the times when conflict situations are dealt with irresponsibly. One of these situations, in Wausau, Wisconsin, made it to court, and a decision this week by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin sets the facts out...

Update: February 2, 2010 (see below)

A recent New York Times article concerns a potential conflict in the city council speaker's office. But what is most interesting about the article is the bigger question it raises about differentiating between businesses and unions in pay-to-play laws.