Oath-some

I can remember the first television programming I ever saw on my family’s first black and white TV. It was 1953 so you might expect that I would recall Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, a primitive but memorable prototype of what would blossom much later into The Muppets. But no, it was the tedious but mesmerizing McCarthy Hearings. I was seven years old at the time and I kept hearing the word “oath” mentioned by Senator McCarthy from time to time. He didn’t mention it as often as he mentioned the word “communist” but I got the impression it wasn’t a good idea to be called a communist because people he was interviewing at the time refused to admit that they were one, over and over again. However, in McCarthy’s mind, it was good to take an oath because that made you a good guy. At the time I asked my father what an oath was, and he told me it was something you said with your hand on a bible which meant that you meant it more than anything else you might say. Later on I saw other programs such as Perry Mason so I got a fairly good idea what an oath was at least in a court room. I also watched JFK’s inauguration ceremony on TV and then knew there was more than one kind of oath one might take.
The New York Times reported recently that a group of Harvard MBA graduates had volunteered to take an oath requiring them to behave ethically in their business practices as they started their careers. Their apparent belief is that by taking an oath, which is a kind of Duracell or Energizer promise with the extra gravitas of ceremony, they will go through life practicing principles of fairness and will keep an eye on the greater good in their business practices. They seem to be forgetting that they will probably encounter a shareholder or two during the course of their careers who will insist that profits and not good intentions are the measure of success, and that solid dividends are a greater source of satisfaction than doing some amorphous or un-measurable “greater good.” The shareholders may even remind the “oath-some” executive that “nice guys finish last.”
Cultures are filled with various forms of formal promises. American culture features marriage vows, testimony oaths, a pledge of allegiance, and more specific ones that pertain to military service, the Boy Scouts, etc. We even sign an oath when we finish filling out our income tax each year, promising the government that we have done our best to tell the truth about income and deductions. My question is: If these promises, oaths, vows, and pledges actually work, why do we have so many lawyers and so many rich ones to boot? The answer is promises don’t work. And that’s why we have laws, written contracts, regulations, and courts. We can make all of the promises we want, but the bottom line is we need to be held accountable because we are all vulnerable to human failing. We may aspire to be guided by Warren Buffett, but we may end up being in the hands of Bernie Madoff. We may have taken an oath, but our oath does not protect us from the actions of others. The fair application of law will. It’s the only practical tool we have.
So when some business leaders and conservative thinkers say we need more freedom to operate business in America and that we need to fear an over-reaction to the recent collapse of the economy by over-regulation, I say let us use regulation and law to encourage real economic development, not bubbles. In other words let’s get real. Forget the promises.
A favorite saying among conservatives is, “That which governs best, governs least.” Perhaps a better alternative is, “That which governs best, governs fairly.” After all, laissez-faire is more laissez than fair.