While the first Reagan Administration was being hammered together four years ago reports of polite declinations appeared: A banker whose family held extensive oil interests refused a job as Deputy Energy Secretary; a senior vice president of a large corporation rejected the offer of a position as Under Secretary of the Interior because he feared that federal restrictions on the activities deemed proper for former government employees would preclude his assuming the rank of president upon his return to his company; while another begged off from the job of Secretary of the Interior because grazing rights held by family members on federal lands in the West invited the inevitable charge of conflict of interest. “It is just ridiculous,” former Treasury Secretary William Simon once remarked of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, passed in the commodious and tumultuous wake of the Watergate scandals four years earlier. “We’re going to end up with nothing but academics and neuters.” In Ethics-in-Government Laws: Are They Too “Ethical”? (American Enterprise Institute, 1150 17th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036; $4.95), Alfred S. Neely IV considers the possible damage to the national polity from the gradual inversion—and I would say perversion—of the hoary stake-in-society argument, by which only men of a certain degree of wealth were adjudged to have sufficient incentive to undertake positions of public trust.
Neely begins by quoting Tocqueville, who observed with customary sageness that “A democracy could surround its magistrates with pomp, covering them in silk and gold, without making any direct attack on the principles of its existence. Such privileges are ephemeral, going with the place rather than with the man. But to establish unpaid official positions is to create a class of rich and independent functionaries and to shape the core of an aristocracy.” Neely proceeds to draw certain distinctions between the premises underlying the 1978 act and those upon which its main predecessor, Title 18 of the U.S. Code, was constructed (“Not insignificantly, that chapter, ‘Bribery, Graft, and Conflicts of Interest,’ appears in a title devoted exclusively to crimes and criminal procedure”). The fundamental difference between the two, he concludes, is that while the ethics-in-government philosophy informing Title 18 is strictly prohibitory, that of the legislation of 1978 is preventive, symbolic, and moralistic, based upon procedures of public disclosure as a means of ensuring that “public rather than private purposes are served in public life.”
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