Better Government Association

Good government is up to the people

By Bill Horne

July 9, 2008

Folks, we just had another state official resign for (and my name for it will be) corruption here in Ohio. I have lost track of the total number of officials that have been accused of breaking the laws here in Ohio, but it is a bunch.

Anyway, this latest scandal started me wondering if it was just Ohio that has corruption problems, or are we normal. And, then of course, the next step is to wonder how the U.S. compares with the rest of the world.

When we study corruption, there are obviously a lot of problems. First and foremost is the fact that we only look at the corruption that we know about. Some people are accused, but are not convicted, and of course, some people just don't get caught. So, what we look at are convictions.

According to the National Press Club Corporate Crime Reporter, Ohio ranks as the 11th most corrupt of the 50 states. Using the conviction criteria, Nebraska is the best and Mississippi is the worst. This report is based on figures gathered for a 10-year period from 1993-2002.

The state ranking, by the report, is based on the number of convictions as a percent of each state's population. When we only look at the total number of convictions, Ohio looks even worse. On the list of the most number of convicted officials, Ohio was the sixth worst, California was the worst and Nebraska was still the best.

That is the bad news. The good news is that it is as much our fault as it is the political system's. The Better Government Association (BGA) looks at why some states are worse or better than other states.

The BGA has decided that "loose standards, secretiveness and lack of accountability are important along with the strength or weakness of a state's economy."

The most important laws, according to the BGA, are "freedom of information, whistleblower protection laws, campaign finance laws, gifts, trips, honoraria laws and conflict of interest laws."

The most important thing however, is something that you and I can help with, and that is we citizens cannot just look the other way when we see or know about corruption.

The BGA notes that "reporters, citizen groups, prosecutors, judges and religious leaders" make a difference when they are willing to take a stand and speak out.

Another way to look at corruption is to compare our country to the other countries of the world.

Transparency International (TI) compares 180 of 193 countries. TI takes a whole group of polls and information to reach its ranking of the corruption by country for the whole world.

So, the ranking of countries does not use as much solid information as we had to rank our states. But it does give us a general idea. The latest ranking, by country, shows that the U.S. has dropped a couple of notches, but still looks pretty good.

We, as a country, rank 20th of the 180 countries evaluated. I believe that one of the reasons that we even rank this low is probably because we provide better and more accurate information. Finland, Denmark and New Zealand tied for best, or least corrupt, countries in the world. The worst, or most corrupt country, is Iraq.

There is one other item that deserves our attention and that is economic freedom. The more freedom economically a country has, the less likely that it will have a high amount of corruption.

This is not a direct comparison, but it is close. The Heritage Foundation looks at 11 different key factors to economic freedom and the United States ranks fifth best in the world. Hong Kong ranks the best and Cuba and North Korea are tied at the bottom as the worst.

The good news is that where citizens take an interest and demand honesty and good government, honesty and good government are available.

On the other hand, if citizens don't care or don't believe that they can have an effect on their government, the government becomes more and more corrupt.

So, all we have to do to have good government is to want good government. Of course, we have to be diligent and get rid of the bums as quickly as we become aware of them. This is even more important when we have knowledge of or know the lawbreaker personally.

We as citizens have to be willing to stand against corruption and not accept it as being OK. And yes, I know we citizens are so busy trying to see to it that our families are taken care of that we don't always feel that there is enough time for any other involvements.

However, if we want our children and grandchildren to have a country that is as good and strong as the one we inherited, then we must take an interest.

We must at the least take an interest to the extent that we support people and organizations that work for good government.

There are reporters and religious leaders and many citizen groups that devote their time to ensuring that we have good government. The least that we can do is find the ones that we believe are doing a good job and support them.