Are you a liberal who foams at the mouth about the immorality of big business? Are you a conservative who rails about giving ten cents to government employees who will waste it or steal it?
Turns out you are all right!
Let’s face it. People are people. Some of us rise to the occasion magnificently. Some of us are utter low lives. Most of us are in the middle; we basically live a decent life, but have our moments of acting poorly.
No matter where each of us falls, however, the bottom line is that government and the private sector has its share of bad apples.
The study, released yesterday by the nonprofit Ethics Resource Center, found that nearly 60 percent of government employees at all levels — federal, state and local — had witnessed violations of ethical standards, policy or laws in their workplaces within the last year.
Observed misconduct was lowest at the federal level, with 52 percent of federal workers surveyed saying they had witnessed problems such as conflicts of interest, abusive behavior, alterations of documents and financial records and lying to employees, vendors or the public within the last year. . . .
The sooner we all recognize this simple fact, the more rapidly we can get to superior solutions to lowering the ill effects of such activity.