The Unintended Consequences of Ethical Reform
posted at 4:49 pm on July 7, 2009 by Doctor Zero
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Palin has dismissed speculation she might leave Juneau for higher office before her term expires in 2010, saying, “My role as governor is where I can be most helpful right now unless something drastic happens, and I don’t anticipate that right now.” – from a December 2007 Associated Press article on Sarah Palin
It’s very difficult to anticipate the future. That’s one of the reasons government should be kept small, and tightly controlled. Justice is often pictured as a blindfolded woman holding scales and a sword. Big Government is a blindfolded ogre with a chainsaw. Government programs always have unintended consequences – often the exact opposite of the legislators’ intentions. The ethics laws Governor Palin signed in 2007, which caused her to prematurely end a remarkably successful term as governor in 2009, are a perfect example of this principle.
Alaskans have very good reasons to be concerned about unethical behavior from their politicians. The ethics reforms championed and signed by Palin in 2007 were meant to add accountability and transparency to state government, by making it easier for citizens to sue politicians for ethics violations. Instead, they became a weapon in the arsenal of mob rule, manipulated by political operatives to hound the governor out of office in a flood of bogus complaints.
Resources intended for use by responsible citizens will inevitably be abused by the most irresponsible forces in public life. I recall a comedian joking that postal change-of-address cards were a great instrument of revenge: “Just write in the name of someone you don’t like, then write where you want his mail to go.” If you drop a few cans of paint and some brushes on a city street, you should remember that the people most likely to pick up those brushes are the people least likely to do something constructive with them. Random vandalism eventually gives way to organized attempts to abuse public systems. Alaskan government followed the same trajectory as an Internet discussion board: they opened the system so anyone could post comments on the expensive ethical complaint forums, then saw the freelance trolls replaced by organized astroturfing.
A legal device like Alaska’s drive-thru ethical complaint system will always do more damage in the hands of political operations, than good in the hands of well-meaning individual citizens. Organized groups with agendas to push have abundant time, energy, and discipline to exploit such mechanisms. If the Alaskan system was adopted in the fabulously corrupt political climate of Chicago, the likely result would be the elimination of the last few reasonably honest politicians, who would be buried under a flood of bogus ethics complaints mass-produced at the local union halls. The lovely dream of the lone citizen crusader, using his lunch hour to file a complaint against an untouchable crook in high office, fades into the ugly reality of groups like ACORN, issuing target lists to their foot soldiers.
Sarah Palin supported the ethics reforms that were used to mummify her in legal paperwork. John McCain was hamstrung by the elaborate campaign finance laws he helped design, even as his opponent cheerfully ignored them, disabling minimal security from his campaign donation website to accommodate a flood of shadowy cash. Both of them were trying to construct ethical safety valves for fundamentally corrupt systems. The only reliable way to keep politicians honest is to limit the inventory of power they have to sell, so bribing them won’t be worth the effort. Make sure they face free and fair elections, to win limited terms at the helm of small, transparent government. It’s better than handing out whistles to the citizens, and hoping only the honest ones blow them.
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Alert, Alert, Alert:
Ward Churchil gets no job and no money.
This helps partially restore my faith in humanity.
Mr. Joe on July 7, 2009 at 5:12 PM
I wholeheartedly agree there’s a problem – I’ve been saying for days that Palin got bitten by her own ethics reform. But I don’t agree with the solution. When the vote usually goes to the guy with more money, it doesn’t matter if you have ‘free and fair’ elections. If you try to limit the cash, then you’ve got the ethics reform you’re championing against.
Maybe Palin’s reform is missing accountability. The complainer must account for his complaint. If it is dismissed as frivolous, there should be a major fine attached.
Phoenician on July 7, 2009 at 5:31 PM
This Time interview with Governor Palin makes her case very clear, and, surprisingly for Time, the reporter steps out of her way and lets her make it:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1908983-3,00.html
In this article, on the other hand, Rich Lowry refers to Governor Palin’s perils in an offhanded sentence fragment:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Nzc0MzY3MWRjMjE1OTE0NmI1ZjYzYzQwMWY1ZTE5Njk=
I understand all of the reasons why people dig in against the idea of a third party, but when Time Magazine is more sympathetic to the plight of a normal person (and a Republican!) trying to make a difference in politics and being stymied by liberal thuggery than is the editor of National Review, one has to wonder how much hope or credit to extend to the mandarins of the movement . . .
loneloc on July 7, 2009 at 5:49 PM
Doctor Zero,
This post makes no sense, it has no real point to it. If it was a bad ethics reform bill she shouldn’t have signed it. She should have either asked the legislature in Alaska to review the bill for potential abuse or had her staff review the bill in house before signing.
But if the bill is good, then what is the complaint? You are angry at the citizens for exercising their rights?
In any event, she should not have to worry in the least bit about the ethics complaints. She dealt with them during the latter bit of the election and several months after. The bills would have been easily paid for by the PAC, speeches, and books. On top of that, the ethics complaints were pretty much an afterthought on most people’s minds across the political spectrum. People accuse her more of being inexperienced, selfish, and dumb far more than being corrupt.
Looks more to me like you are looking for excuses for this woman instead of grasping the hard truth.
ckoeber on July 7, 2009 at 8:03 PM
If you “limit the inventory of power” for an office, do the stripped powers go away or are they redistributed among the balance of government mechanisms? My hope is that they go away.
ericdijon on July 7, 2009 at 8:11 PM
No, I’m pointing out that noble intentions went into Alaska’s ethics reforms, but the result was inevitable. I’m sure McCain and Feingold sincerely wanted to “clean up” the problems they saw with elections, but they only made them more complicated, not more pure or transparent.
Like gun laws, complex political ethics reforms are most likely to damage the people least in need of careful oversight. John McCain’s legislative assault on free speech primarily hurt John McCain, which is grimly satisfying from a karmic standpoint, but comfort to people watching Obama close in on double digit unemployment and economy-shattering deficits. Meanwhile, the ugly circus of ACORN vote fraud, abuses of power by Ohio Democrats, Black Panther voter intimidation, and shady campaign finance that put Obama in the White House succeeded without any consequences for the perpetrators. Likewise, Palin supported the creation of a political loaded gun in Alaska, and should not be surprised by who raced to pick it up, or who they chose to point it at.
The only way to have meaningful political reform is to have less politics. The American political scene needs massive urban renewal, not neighborhood watch programs.
That’s my hope too. The stripping won’t be easy.
Doctor Zero on July 7, 2009 at 8:52 PM
That’s impossible both in theory and in practice.
You are calling for something that doesn’t make sense. Even if a Republican was ushered into the white house in 2012 and 2016 with massive gains in the senate and congress, what would they do to “reduce politics”?
A smaller government is just that, a smaller footprint. But that makes every move the government makes that more pronounced.
Redistribution of power happens in unpredictable ways. The power won’t “go away”. It will just be assumed by a different body.
Be careful what you hope or wish for. We may be angry at government but corporate monopolies answer to NO ONE.
You must have balance.
ckoeber on July 7, 2009 at 9:25 PM
I think you’re confusing a small government with a small franchise. If the number of people who govern or who choose the government is small relative to the polity, then you’d be correct; you’re essentially describing an oligarchy. However, what DrZ is positing is a central government with a small sphere of influence, which would not filter down to the average citizen on a daily or even regular basis.
This should not be unpredictable at all. Everyone seems to have forgotten what the word “federal” actually means. In our Constitutional system as originally designed, power, like water, should naturally settle to the lowest possible point. The federal government was designed to perform only those functions that required cooperation across states or that required one voice, such as internal improvements in the first instance and foreign diplomacy in the second. The states were supposed to be the largest body of government with which citizens had regular contact, and the townships and counties were supposed to wield the most real power in a familiar sense. I’m currently just over halfway through Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville; the federal monstrosity that we have now was literally unimaginable in 1831.
It always amuses me how corporate monopolies are constantly brought up as a terrifying alternative to Big Government. In point of fact, as Adam Smith elucidated in The Wealth of Nations, corporate monopolies cannot exist without the collusion of Big Government; competitive forces would tear them apart without it. How many American monopolies were there before the Civil War, and how many after? Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Carnegie could not have existed without exclusive spheres of influence carved for them by the newly empowered post-Civil War federal government. My guess is that the next monopoly that you’re likely to see is Government Motors.
Indeed so. However, the federal leviathan has been unchecked for the last hundred years, so I’m not hopeful of any balance now.
loneloc on July 7, 2009 at 10:10 PM
Having a central government with a small sphere of influence is also impossible. Our Bill of Rights demands a robust government that can ensure equal protection and delivery of said rights. It’s why people who would like the government to intervene on things like gay marriage and abortion look silly; having the states arbitrate those laws and rights would undoubtedly give certain citizens unequal rights per state.
Besides, what constitutes big vs. small? Who are the judges and jury of that? If it is the American people, I believe they make themselves clear every election cycle.
Ask yourself this: What is more important – having a ‘small’ government or having a government that works?
The former makes no sense in my opinion.
The states are still generally the largest body of government. Delivery of most public services occurs through the states (schools, police, hospitals, fire departments, etc.)
You are confusing the growth of the federal government with (1) the growth of the United States and (2) the growth of the Federal Budget. Take out Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and the Military and we have a far more manageable chunk of Federal Government as I am guessing you would envision it.
I would correct your statement in that monopolies cannot exist without a governing body enforcing the rule of law. Case in point: Microsoft. How did Big Government aid Microsoft in its quest in monopolization of computers? Do you truly believe that a completely free market would be able to sustain that monopolization?
Or people began to see the fact that there are certain things that only government can do. The need for Medicare/Medicaid occurred because the free markets found it unprofitable to ensure the poor and elderly.
ckoeber on July 7, 2009 at 11:48 PM
These two sentences are a perfect distillation of your excellent essay.
onthego on July 8, 2009 at 3:46 AM
Why would it make it more pronounced? Seems counterintuitive to me.
The constitution says the rest of the powers belong to the people. Why did you go leaping to the conclusion of corporate monopolies? Why do you think government ought to balance out corporations?
Also, how does getting rid of the Dept of Education and letting those responsibilities revert back to the states and (more importantly) the parents cause a problem with corporate monopolies? Ditto with the National Endowment for the Arts?
onthego on July 8, 2009 at 3:58 AM
The Bill of Rights — which as commonly understood is constituted by the first ten amendments to the Constitution — all represents restrictions on the federal government’s scope of action and sphere of influence. The First Amendment begins with five of the most beautiful words in the English language: “Congress shall make no law.” Abiding by the Bill of Rights doesn’t require any effort by the federal government other than that of self-restraint.
This is the case now. If I still smoked, I could smoke in a bar in Missouri but not Illinois. This was anticipated and encouraged by the Founders, who believed that most things were best regulated at the local level, since the United States was already large enough by 1789 that mores and customs differed substantially from region to region.
Your first statement is sad but true; it is of course one thing to argue about the best of all possible worlds and another to address the world in which we actually live. As John Derbyshire would attest, the proper attitude of a conservative is pessimism. As to your second, it depends on what you mean by “works.” If you mean “provide everything to everyone,” no, it doesn’t — but no conceivable government can be large enough to do so. And the idea that you can print, borrow, and regulate your way to paradise will not “work,” either. What smaller government can do, though, is get out of the way of free and productive activity.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
The military, of course, is an explicit Constitutional duty of the federal government. It’s not just entitlements, though, although they are pernicious; it’s the federal government being so awash in cash that it can bribe and blackmail the states into following a centrally planned course. The idea behind a limited central government, as DrZ has said, is that the fewer enumerated powers that the central government has, the less likely corruption and abuse of power becomes. The reason that politics is such a bloodbath today is that politicians wield less the powers of the US Senate as originally conceived and more the powers of the Roman Senate.
I believe that Microsoft became a monopoly by gaining early and exclusive entry into the largest market in the world — the federal bureaucracy. That decision was made by bureaucrats, not the free market. And no, I don’t think that a completely free market could “sustain that monopolization” — I would think that you would think that would be a good thing.
And yet, somehow, we’ve managed to have poor and old people with us through all of history. It used to be that families took care of their elderly or relatives hard on their luck; the federal government materially undermined the moral fabric of this country by relieving them of that responsibility. Poor and elderly people in extremis and with no possibility of care have always had charitable assistance — another area of civic responsibility that has deteriorated under the solicitous assault of big government — and the states have always had mechanisms to catch the few that fell completely between the cracks. Government was never supposed to do everything; society was supposed to do the heavy lifting. Government and society entered a devil’s bargain wherein society surrendered power as well as responsibility to the government; I guess we’ll see how that works out.
loneloc on July 8, 2009 at 8:02 AM
Microsoft is not a monopoly. Brace yourself before you click the links below, because they’re going to rock your world.
http://www.apple.com
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/07/google-drops-a-nuclear-bomb-on-microsoft-and-its-made-of-chrome/
Your overall point about corporate versus government power is a provocative one. I hope you don’t mind if I use it as a springboard for another piece.
Doctor Zero on July 8, 2009 at 8:10 AM
Yes, Microsoft is not a monopoly because of the fact that the Government intervened.
If it were not for the government; Microsoft would have bundle their office productivity software, operating system, browser, etc. into one singular package to kill Apple long before they came back.
Microsoft couldn’t do that because the government intervened before it was too late.
ckoeber on July 8, 2009 at 9:39 AM
Incorrect. What stops the state of New York from censoring any newspapers? Or how about the state of Nebraska trying criminal cases without juries? Federal statutes! The Federal government must be active in ensuring that the Bill of Rights is equally applied in all states. The only time the Federal government should be passive or practice self-restraint is when a said right or privilege is not explicitly defined in a Federal statute.
We are arguing two different things. I am talking about the creation and dissolution of Federal statutes in the case of abortion and gay marriage while you are talking about an enforcement or lack thereof.
Again, you are engaged in the exercise of determining big versus small government. I will argue that most people don’t care what the size of government is. If the government properly adheres to the commitment to the people as written in the constitution of that nation, then the government must become however big or small to properly carry out those commitments. For example, take the first amendment. In order to ensure free speech there must be a federal entity as part of the government in place to ensure that the amendment holds. Otherwise the amendment is just words on a piece of paper.
On an even deeper level, we list some of the inalienable rights of man within the Declaration of Independence. In order to ensure that people have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness you must ensure that there are institutions in place by a governing authority to protect and provide for those rights. Otherwise, again, they would just be words on a piece of paper.
Any place that has a collection of resources and authority would become corrupt. If you are arguing that it would be better for the private sector to deliver more of the services that the public sector currently does then I would say that you are proven wrong by history. The government has grown generally because the private sector has failed. Medicare/Medicaid arose, as mentioned before, because the private sector was not delivering a needed service – care for the elderly and poor.
That argument is unsustainable – under that logic the American automotive industry would have a monopoly in the United States because practically until the last five (5) years all government agencies bought American vehicles. In reality, Microsoft became a monopoly by bundling all of their software together (office productivity, web browsing, operating system, etc.) in one. On top of that, they initially had better groupware products for office use.
Yes, we had the poor and elderly with us throughout history but that doesn’t mean we cared for them. To suggest that the Government is responsible for the decay of the moral fabric of this country would be arguing against facts and history. The government is not some unknown entity that exists in an outworld, the government is a body of people.
Overall your argument doesn’t bear out. The inalienable rights of man should not be left to the whim of charity of a society – that leads to massive sections and groups that are left out due to individual prejudices and lack of resources. Under your vision slavery and discrimination would still exist because there would be no governing body that enforced the Bill of Rights for all – everything would be left to the collective charity of the oppressors and bystanders.
ckoeber on July 8, 2009 at 10:25 AM
Yes, Microsoft is not a monopoly because of the fact that the Government intervened.
If it were not for the government; Microsoft would have bundle their office productivity software, operating system, browser, etc. into one singular package to kill Apple long before they came back.
Microsoft couldn’t do that because the government intervened before it was too late.
ckoeber on July 8, 2009 at 9:39 AM
—–
Pardon me, a mere systems engineer, from jumping in but …
Your facts are in error.
The seeds of Microsofts’ demise are the same as those that brought down IBM a generation earlier – a simple change from being more interested in growth to being more interested in stability.
The latter is driven by large corporate customers – change is expensive. The former is driven by small customers who want that elusive feature that will reduce their costs.
Once Microsoft toggled over from encouraging change (giving away (or not prosecuting for piracy thereof) their compilers, giving away their OS, thus encouraging the geek-on-the-street to tinker and try new things) to discouraging change (predictable patch release cycle, software roadmap years into the future) their fate was sealed.
Or, did you really think “the government” (by which I must presume you mean the European Union since they did far more damage to MS than the U.S. government did…) brought their suits in isolation?
Mew
acat on July 8, 2009 at 11:37 AM
That argument is unsustainable – under that logic the American automotive industry would have a monopoly in the United States because practically until the last five (5) years all government agencies bought American vehicles. In reality, Microsoft became a monopoly by bundling all of their software together (office productivity, web browsing, operating system, etc.) in one. On top of that, they initially had better groupware products for office use.
ckoeber on July 8, 2009 at 10:25 AM
—–
This is patently false.
Microsoft leveraged their existing near-monopoly of the desktop operating system to try to create a secondary monopoly in office software suites.
Microsoft did this because, surprise surprise, there’s a hell of a lot more money from corporate customers buying office than there is in selling an OS. Corporate customers upgrade office suites right on schedule like clockwork.
Most customers, corporate or otherwise, don’t buy a new OS without buying a new computer, and as the period right before and right after Y2K demonstrated, most customers, corporate or otherwise, can vary the length of time they put up with the old pretty widely. (perhaps you’ve heard of the dot-com bubble?)
Point is, Microsofts’ OS monopoly made many men massively monied, but it also was unpredictable, and waiting for an upstart, be it DR-DOS or BeOS or Linux, to come along and knock them off. Also, the DR-DOS and Stacker lawsuits had exposed Microsofts’ predation in this area.. a second shot at suppressing an opponent was unlikely to succeed.
Mew
acat on July 8, 2009 at 11:44 AM
Overall your argument doesn’t bear out. The inalienable rights of man should not be left to the whim of charity of a society – that leads to massive sections and groups that are left out due to individual prejudices and lack of resources. Under your vision slavery and discrimination would still exist because there would be no governing body that enforced the Bill of Rights for all – everything would be left to the collective charity of the oppressors and bystanders.
ckoeber on July 8, 2009 at 10:25 AM
—-
One of my favourite quotes, ckober, is “Laws do not go around on wheels enforcing themselves”. It’s attributed, IIRC, to Eric Flint, a writer of science fiction of some note.
You appear to be appealing to laws-on-wheels here. It’s a bogus argument. No. Such. Thing.
Your rights, and mine, depend – in the end – upon our ability as individuals to enforce societal mores on one another, and as a society to defend ourselves from other societies.
Mew
acat on July 8, 2009 at 11:49 AM
I will just respond to this last comment here, as your first two responses does not dispute my core argument about Microsoft; they complimented them.
You write: One of my favorite quotes, ckoeber, is “Laws do not go around on wheels enforcing themselves”. It’s attributed, IIRC, to Eric Flint, a writer of science fiction of some note.
That is precisely my point. How will the Bill of Rights, a federal statute, be upheld without a strong central government? Or, for that matter, how will the inalienable rights expressed in the declaration of independence be upheld?
Also, you write: Your rights, and mine, depend – in the end – upon our ability as individuals to enforce societal mores on one another, and as a society to defend ourselves from other societies.
So, let’s dissolve the police then but keep the military? Or how about leave the sick to die in the street as it is up to individual charity?
Your views just don’t match up to what Americans believe or what the founders envisioned.
ckoeber on July 8, 2009 at 12:50 PM
… Or noble intentions allegedly went into Alaska’s ethics reform and McCain-Feingold. One could say that Unions, Minimum Wages, Affirmative Action, &c all had noble motivations, but it is very likely that from their inception there were individuals that wanted to use theses “reforms,” to gain more power. Perhaps Palin did have good intentions, but it is all together possible that someone else didn’t. The more the actual corrupt (by nature) government tries to “reform,” the more likely that an actual corrupt individual will be empowered.
Well, we might not get that, so we might want to get a plan B. Sure, it’s great to think that we (flawed humans as we are) can have meaningful political reform, but the ultimate goal should be to weaken government to a point were a corrupt government cannot have unchecked powers.
Upstater85 on July 8, 2009 at 1:06 PM
Perhaps I’m a little late to this conversation, but what’s this about Microsoft not having a monopoly? Sure, one can argue that Microsoft has some competition (a handful). There are the big corporations, and then there are none.
Government regulations may appear to have nice, well-intended motivations, but in the end, they tend to only empower the all-ready powerful and to squish the tiny starters.
Upstater85 on July 8, 2009 at 1:16 PM
ckoeber on July 8, 2009 at 12:50 PM
—–
One of us is, at a fundamental level, misunderstanding the other.
Mew
acat on July 8, 2009 at 1:47 PM
Actually, in the original conception of the federal union, it would have been the bills of rights of the states — each of which had one, most of which were further-reaching than the federal Bill of Rights — that served this role. This was accepted jurisprudence until Gitlow in 1925.
Here’s what I was responding to: “having the states arbitrate those laws and rights would undoubtedly give certain citizens unequal rights per state.” That was an intended and, to a degree, encouraged outcome in the federal system. I can smoke in a public indoor space in Missouri, but not Illinois. Likewise, from a strictly federalist viewpoint, abortion and gay marriage might be permissible in Illinois but not Missouri . . . unless those on one side or the other of the argument could clear the deliberately huge hurdles necessary to amend the Constitution. That is why, even from a strictly legal viewpoint, Roe remains the ultimate example of judicial overreach.
Again, the First Amendment begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting . . .” It takes no bureaucracy or force to honour that commitment. The Declaration of Independence enumerates the rights of the people vis-a-vis the government — the government has no right to take life or liberty, or to impede the pursuit of happiness, without due process. Again, all the government has to do to fulfill those obligations is to exercise self-restraint. To be perfectly frank, Thomas Jefferson would be horrified to have the Declaration cited in support of the need of a massive federal bureaucracy.
Obviously, the market isn’t the ideal delivery system for those without money. However, assuming that there is a need and the public will to provide a safety net, don’t you think that it would make more sense for a unit of government that is actually close enough to the problem to customize a solution to a local problem — say, a state, county, or even township — to provide it? Not only are the one-size-fits-all programs that come from Washington hugely wasteful and unwieldy, but they actually distort the market and make care tremendously expensive overall and everywhere, which exacerbates the problem. Part of the reason that medical care is so expensive now is that medical billing staffs represent huge overhead, and another reason is that doctors maintain high rates because they know that Medicare will pay them. And all of that leaves aside the fact that Washington steals from Florida to disburse money to Oregon, so to speak — in what part of the Constitution can that authority be found?
Ah, but there’s the rub — “American vehicles” is not now, nor has it ever been, a company. American Motors was, but the government bought very few of its cars. The government doesn’t always pick an early winner in emergent technologies, although it probably helped Ford Motor Company retain an effective monopoly for longer than it might have. When it does, though — in the case of Standard Oil Company or the Vanderbilt railroad empire, for example — the effect is to provide that winner with the resources to bury its competition, with the government turning a blind eye. Now, once the technology matures, there’s usually an antitrust backlash, which gives the government a reputation as a trustbuster . . . but again, I submit that, as with most market distortions, where you find a monopoly, dig a little and you’ll find federal acquisitions officers under the muck.
We did care for those who could find no other help; the difference between then and now is that government was the last resort, not the first. I understand that the government is a body of people, but when those people starting taking money from some families and using it to absolve other families of their responsibilities to their own, those people undermined the moral fabric of the United States. “Facts and history” are not some monolithic totem that I’m bashing my brains out against — they are discrete data. If you’ve got some, use them.
Whether or not “the inalienable rights of man” should be “left to the whim of charity of society,” the cold fact is that they are, whether that charity is exercised at the private or public level. Did you forget that slavery was perfectly legal under the Bill of Rights, not to mention discrimination? Until the federal government was prodded to take action to save the Union, the only succour that freedmen or slaves received was from charities and other private civic organizations such as the Underground Railroad. As you yourself said, the government is not alien — it is made of people who are no better or worse than the polity that they govern. These people are as prone as any other to abuse their authority and selectively enforce rights and laws as any other — that is why the Founders saw fit to narrow the scope of authority as the reach of authority increased. If the federal government follows its mandate under the Bill of Rights and restrains itself, the liberty of the people will take care of itself.
loneloc on July 8, 2009 at 6:46 PM