Corruption is as old as politics, almost certainly dating back well into prehistory, from the days when the esteemed flint-knapper Groog gave a 10 percent cut in meat and furs to the clan chief Korg to allow the import of cheap, sub-quality flint from the clan to the east, who charged only one deerskin per armload of flint instead of the three the clan to the north were charging. The tribe ended up with lousy tools, but they were cheap, and both Groog and Korg ended up with a lot of deerskins.
That kind of thing is still going on, and it explains why so many politicians are getting fabulously wealthy on comparatively modest salaries. Earlier on Monday, my colleague Rusty Weiss, who is not collecting any deerskins that I'm aware of, informed us that Elon Musk and his DOGE team are looking into the matter.
Rusty writes:
Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), indicated he will be turning his crew's attention to members of Congress who have amassed fortunes despite having base salaries under $200,000.
The tech mogul and philanthropist made the comments during a rally in Wisconsin for state Supreme Court candidate Judge Brad Schimel.
"A lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress - where I just can't - I'm trying to connect the dots of how did they become rich," he told those in attendance.
"How'd they get $20 million if they're earning $200,000 a year? Nobody can explain that," added Musk. "We're gonna try to figure it out and certainly stop it from happening."
Oh, I suspect there's an explanation, and I think we all know the broad strokes. Corruption.
See Also: Chuck Schumer Bemoans the Schumer Shutdown's Effect on Americans While Hiding Behind His Fat Wallet
The great Roman scholar Livy, who lived in old Rome, walked her streets and knew her people, wrote of that great civilization:
Rome was originally, when it was poor and small, a unique example of austere virtue; then it corrupted, it spoiled, it rotted itself by all the vices; so, little by little, we have been brought into the present condition in which we are able neither to tolerate the evils from which we suffer, nor the remedies we need to cure them.
Sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it?
In Rome, by the time of the Gracchi, and later Julius Caesar, his cousin Mark Antony, and the infamous Marcus Junius Brutus, had grown very corrupt indeed. Bribery was a way of doing business; it was, more or less, expected. Caesar made himself monstrously rich campaigning in Gaul and elsewhere, cashing in on the spoils of war. How, then, are our modern politicians growing so wealthy on such modest means? They aren't invading neighboring countries and growing rich on plunder, but they are engaged in other shady dealings. Case in point: the late Nevada Senator Harry Reid's real estate shenanigans.
In 2004, the senator made $700,000 off a land deal that was, to say the least, unorthodox. It started in 1998 when he bought a parcel of land with attorney Jay Brown, a close friend whose name has surfaced multiple times in organized-crime investigations and whom one retired FBI agent described as “always a person of interest.” Three years after the purchase, Reid transferred his portion of the property to Patrick Lane LLC, a holding company Brown controlled. But Reid kept putting the property on his financial disclosures, and when the company sold it in 2004, he profited from the deal — a deal on land that he didn’t technically own and that had nearly tripled in value in six years.
The examples of this sort of thing are legion: Her Imperial Majesty Hillary I, Dowager-Empress of Chappaqua, for example, and her uncanny good fortune in cattle futures.
On October 11, 1978, the future First Lady, a neophyte investor with an annual income of $25,000, opened a commodity-futures account with a deposit of $1,000. Her first trade was the short sale of ten live-cattle contracts at a price of 57.55 cents a pound: a commitment to deliver in December of that year 400,000 pounds of cattle with a market value of $230,200. One day later, she bought the contracts back at a price of 56.10 cents, just 0.15 cent above the low of the day, pocketing $5,300 for a return of 530 per cent.
This isn't just corruption; it is blatant, unapologetic corruption, practically daring the taxpaying citizens to do anything about it. It can't continue. Political corruption was, in large part, what ended the Roman Republic and, later, the Empire. No nation that has become so corrupt that open bribery is so commonplace, so widely accepted as inevitable, can long survive.
That's why this is important. This is why the efforts of Elon Musk and the DOGE matter. This is why the investigation that Rusty writes of must go forward.
The Roman poet Horace wrote, around 20-30 BC, during the time of the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire, of Rome's deterioration.
Aetas parentum, peior avis, tulit
Nos nequiores, mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem.
In English: "Our fathers were worse than our grandsires; we have deteriorated from our fathers; our sons will cause us to be lamented."
We have a chance to bring our nation back from this fate, to undo what people like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have wrought. Finding out precisely how these people grow such fat bank balances is the start. But it cannot be the end; that, that end, must lie with us, the voters - the citizens. These people must be held accountable for their corruption.
