Abortion, deregulation and human nature

Some issues have become so politicized that the truth becomes the first casualty. Take abortion. Some pro-abortionists claim that until a fetus is “viable,” it is no different than a piece of lettuce or rock. But they can’t even agree on what the word “viable” means. Some say that the fetus is not viable until you can hear the baby’s heartbeat. Others claim that the fetus is not viable until the baby can live outside of the mother’s womb without assistance.

What they ignore is that unless the mother’s egg is fertilized by the father’s sperm, life cannot start. Once that egg is fertilized, if it is not aborted in the mother’s womb, it will emerge, nine months after conception, as a baby. If you can’t get a baby unless the egg is fertilized, life has to start at conception.

The problem of applying logic to politically explosive issues is that it strips people of their ability to posture and emote. If we accept that life starts at conception, we must ask why is it illegal to kill the baby one second after it is born but legal to kill (abort) it five months after it starts growing in its mother’s womb. That is a question that pro-abortionists simply don’t want to answer. So they and their political supporters just ignore reality.

This tendency to ignore reality to fit one’s political agenda is not limited to liberals. Conservatives and libertarians are infected with the same disease when it comes to government deregulation. I, like most rational people, believe that government governs best when it does the least amount of harm with the greatest amount of efficiency.

But that doesn’t mean that I support the abolition of government. For better and sometimes for worse, there are things that governments must do. The terrorist attacks on America have reminded all of us of the importance of fire fighters, police officers, public health workers and our military.

We all know that there are evil people in the world. Every religion talks about those who are evil doers. Far too many of our fellow citizens make their “living” as thieves, crooks, murderers, embezzlers and shysters.

Yet when you talk about deregulation, some otherwise intelligent people act as though once government gets out of the way, all of the crooks will suddenly disappear. The fact that evil has been with us from the beginning – remember Cain and Abel? – is just ignored.

In late 1981, I was a member of a McKinsey & Company team working on a project for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. We were looking at the impact deregulating the banking and savings-and-loan industry would have on the financial viability of banks and savings and loans.

We determined that deregulation would lead to record-breaking bank and savings and loan failures. That study was forwarded to all members of the Reagan administration and Congress. But it was not what the champions of deregulation wanted to hear, so it was ignored. Soon thereafter, banks and savings and loans started to fail.

When the bill is totaled up, taxpayers will have paid more than $600 billion to cover this fiasco. This is because our leaders refused to accept the fact that deregulation, without safeguards, would be viewed by some as a license to steal.

Congress is now admitting that it failed America when it rejected efforts to tighten accounting laws and regulations two years ago. These changes would have prevented the Enron meltdown from happening. At the heart of the proposed and rejected rules was a prohibition of accounting firms auditing their client’s books and consulting with those clients.

The rejected rules reflected the hard reality that accounting firms make as much, or more money from consulting with a large client. For example, before Accenture (previously Andersen Consulting) split from Arthur Andersen (now Andersen), the partners of Arthur Andersen made more money from the fees that the Andersen Consulting partners generated than from accounting. And once Andersen Consulting became a separate entity, Andersen (the accounting firm), got back into the consulting business to continue to make extra money from their clients.

That practice must stop immediately because the conflict of interest cannot be overcome. It is time for the government to require every accounting firm to divest itself of its consulting business. It is time for accountants to decide what they want to do.

If they want to be consultants, great. But they will have to stop being accountants. Because if we can’t trust our accountants and auditors to protect us from crooks, our entire financial system will collapse.

As more information emerges from the Enron-Andersen-Vinson & Elkins scandal, it will become increasingly clear that many people did all they could do to keep the government from making sure that they were telling the truth. At the end of the day, our choice is simple. We either continue to accept that bad people exist and must be policed, or we allow bad people to do whatever they want and get taken to the cleaners. What we can’t have is total deregulation and protection from crooks.

I believe that intelligent deregulation makes tremendous sense. I do not, however, believe in allowing people to lie, cheat and steal in the name of deregulation. I would love to live in a world where everyone tells the truth because that was the right thing to do.

But until I die and go to heaven, I will keep my eyes open and my powder dry.