Category: government

Honesty

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October 19, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

ChatGPT was released just three years ago and AI technology has been widely adopted by the public. Some high school students use AI programs to write their college admissions essay. These essays are easy to identify and may affect a student’s chance of acceptance (Source). The AI detection tool Turnitin, used by many colleges, has identified some AI text in millions of students’ papers (Source). What’s the concern? Students are judged on their efforts, not the efforts of OpenAI, the company that developed and trained ChatGPT. In this context, misrepresentation is dishonest. The issue is not AI, but honesty. This week I want to explore the axis of honesty and dishonesty. My second axis will be personhood, whether an entity is regarded as a person or not.

Dishonesty is a master of disguises. Sometimes we are dishonest to protect our privacy. A company asks for a phone number and we give them an old one or make up a number. We are dishonest to avoid embarrassment. We use dishonesty as a social grease, smoothing out uncomfortable interactions. We call them white lies. Parents struggle to explain to their young children the difference between a bad lie and a white lie. An older child, perhaps eleven or twelve, will argue with us over our criteria.

Politicians use dishonesty as a political grease to ease out of an uncomfortable or embarrassing set of circumstances. Corporations are dishonest for the same reason. They may be protecting trade secrets or disguising their real intentions from competitors. A company may announce the launch of a new product that they know is not ready to ship. They hope to attract more investment or dissuade competitors from entering that particular market. In 1985, a company called Ovation introduced a new suite of office software with a fake demonstration of its capabilities, even though the software was still in early development. The company hoped the demonstration would attract investment (Source). Esther Dyson coined the term “vaporware” to describe such products.

Some of us don’t respect corporations in general, but most companies have to operate with some degree of honesty. They have to supply a consistent product or service to retain current customers and attract new customers. They must meet their customers somewhere in the distance between the company’s needs and their customers’ needs. A corporation may behave like a ruthless profit machine at times but it not a robotic machine like an LLM.

Corporations are steered by people who act with intention. An AI makes connections between patterns of what appear to it as binary digits. We recognize the mistakes that AI programs make as hallucinations because we regard an LLM like ChatGPT as a machine, a tool. It has no intention, no driving force other than electricity. Its resources, the electricity, the chips and the digital storage, are given to it. If an AI appears to act with intention, it is because people imbue it with intention. My cordless drill just turns. It has no intention to make a ¼” hole in a wood panel. I am the one who transforms the turning of the drill into a hole.

Neither an AI nor a corporation are biological entities, yet the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are persons. The issue first arose shortly after ratification of the 14th Amendment, which granted equal protection under the law to “persons.” In an 1882 Supreme Court case, San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road,  Roscoe Conklin represented the defendant in the case, Southern Pacific Railroad. Conklin was a former Senator and the last living member of a Congressional Committee that had drafted the 14th Amendment. He informed the Court that the drafting committee had changed the word citizen to person to include corporations under the Equal Protection Clause of the amendment (Source).

In her book These Truths: A History of the United States, historian Jill Lepore (2018, p. 338) writes that Conklin was probably lying. Other evidence during the drafting of the amendment doesn’t support Conklin’s claim. Adam Winkler (2018), the author of We the Corporations, recounts the history of the corporate rights movement and concurs with Lepore. However, the Court made reference to that claim in another case four years later. In subsequent 20th century cases, the Court granted that corporations were artificial persons, but persons nevertheless for the purposes of the Equal Protection Clause (Source). That precedent was the basis for the Court’s decision in Citizens United giving corporations free speech rights. The court ignored any evidence that Conklin was lying because the conservative justices on the Roberts’ court fancy themselves to be very knowledgeable in both history and the law.

Conklin’s deception illustrates the fact that dishonesty can be an effective strategy to achieve one’s goals. In Conklin’s case, the likelihood of a favorable ruling from the court led to a settlement. Dishonesty as an effective strategy is only possible if we can anticipate the response to our dishonesty. We have to put ourselves in the mind of our audience, a difficult task for a young child, who may be befuddled when challenged over a ridiculous lie. “You didn’t do your vocabulary homework because it got wet in the rain. How is that possible? It hasn’t rained today.”

Animals may exhibit displays that misrepresent their size, or the direction they are facing but we don’t regard animals as dishonest. Many animals, particularly males, resolve disputes with aggressive displays that threaten violence to their opponent. Often, the display itself resolves the problem. One animal backs down out of concern for their own self-preservation. A display rather than an actual fight conserves energy.

Politicians lie so often that the public may be partially desensitized. But the police can lie as well? In a 1969 case Frazier v Cupp, the Supreme Court ruled that police can, in some circumstances, mislead a suspect to elicit a confession (Source). According to Standard 3-1.4 of the Criminal Justice Standards, a prosecuting attorney “should not make a statement of fact or law, or offer evidence, that the prosecutor does not reasonably believe to be true, to a court, lawyer, witness, or third party, except for lawfully authorized investigative purposes” (Source). Notice that law enforcement are bound by a negative. They “should not.” As the American Bar Association says, the word should is aspirational.

In court a lay or expert witness must take an oath to tell the whole truth. They are bound by a positive law that is not aspirational. Why the different standards? A prosecuting attorney is not supposed to give evidence. That is the duty of a witness. However, it can appear that there is a lower standard for law enforcement. This creates distrust of the police and the prosecuting attorneys that represent the government. Cynical public opinion might reason that the job of law enforcement is to get a high conviction rate in order to be an efficient use of taxpayer money. Their job is not to tell the truth. This raises another issue. Do our expectations of honesty vary with the role that people play?

I do not expect my friends to be honest in a Friday night poker game. I do expect them not to cheat. We make a distinction between honesty and cheating. In poker dishonesty is a guarding of private information, the value of the cards in my hand. The government sometimes plays a form of poker with the public. Accused of hiding information, a government official will claim that there are security concerns. The information may reveal incompetence, or poor decision making and the administration wants to protect its reputation. An opposing political party might use the information to sway public opinion in an upcoming election. Is the government cheating?

The Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966 and amended in 1974 after the Watergate scandal. The act applies only to federal agencies. Each state has its own open records procedures. A media outlet first files a request for information from a U.S. government agency. If the agency refuses the request, the requester can file an appeal with the agency. If the agency denies the appeal, then the requester of the information can sue the agency in a U.S. District Court (Source). As in a poker game, the requester must expend both time and effort to access the information. Sometimes the government redacts a lot of the information contained within the released documents (Source).

There are also instances where government agencies are required to not release information  which would interfere with the pricing mechanisms of the stock and bond markets. The Federal Reserve has a blackout period of about ten days before an FOMC meeting to determine interest rates. Here is a link to this year’s calendar. During this period, Fed officials do not respond to policy questions from the media so as to not create expectations that might influence the market.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics safeguards the information in the monthly labor report before releasing it at a specific time, usually on the first Friday of each month. Some employees at the White House are advised of the data before its release so that they have comments prepared in advance (Source). In 2018, Trump moved markets when he tweeted a hint at the numbers in advance of the official release time (Source). In this case, a violation of the rules had the same effect as cheating. Trump has also been accused of fudging his golf handicap (Source). The President may regard both dishonesty and cheating as effective strategies to reach his goals, but I would not play poker of golf with someone who had that attitude.

When governments or corporations hide information, we may call it dishonesty, or a lack of transparency. Which is it? The label depends on the label maker. If we are hostile to the policies or actions of a particular government, we may label that dishonesty. Someone who is more neutral might label it a lack of transparency. Someone who favors that policy, party or government may speculate that there must be a good reason.

As it turns out, honesty is not easy to objectively identify in many everyday circumstances. I underline the word objectively. Even when we identify dishonesty, our reaction to it may be rather benign. We create judicial institutions and procedures to help unravel the subjective perceptions of honesty in a particular circumstance. In court we ask juries to evaluate the honesty and credibility of testimony. Unlike honesty, we have left the determination of personhood to a few justices on the Supreme Court and a footnote mention of corporate personhood in an 1886 case. Why do we treat these two concepts differently?

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Photo by Phạm Trần Hoàn Thịnh on Unsplash

Lepore, J. (2018). These truths: A history of the United States (First edition). W. W. Norton & Company.

Winkler, A. (2018). We the corporations: How American businesses won their civil rights. Liveright/Norton.

The Magical Beast

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February 23, 2025

by Stephen Stofka

This is second in a series on centralized power. I decided to use a more conventional narrative rather than the debate format of previous posts. Research on this topic upset my “apple cart” of preconceptions regarding spending, taxes, and Republican support for some social programs. I survived.

Proponents of smaller government aim to restrain the growth of government spending by reducing tax revenue. In a 1981 Address to the Nation shortly after taking office, President Ronald Reagan first proposed the idea. If Congress would not cut back spending, then reducing tax revenues would force them to cut spending. As many political leaders did, Reagan assumed that the public would not tolerate the nation running large fiscal deficits. For most of the eight years he was in office, government spending stayed fairly constant at about 22% of GDP and the federal deficit remained at the same percent of GDP as during Jimmy Carter’s term. After 9-11, the public’s tolerance for deficits grew. The feckless Bush administration promised that Iraqi oil production would pay for the costs of invading the country. In 2003, the Republican Congress passed tax cuts and Bush won reelection despite the many failures of the Iraqi invasion. This time, he did so without the help of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court. It was the last time a Republican would win the popular vote until the election of Donald Trump in 2024.

A 2006 analysis by Christina and David Romer found little support for the Starve the Beast hypothesis and suggested that lowering taxes may, in fact, increase spending. In a 2006 paper, William Niskanen, former head of the Cato Institute, found that spending and tax revenues moved in opposite directions. One of the pathways for this phenomenon may be that taxpayers come to disconnect the two forces, taxes and spending, and don’t hold politicians responsible. For a politician, cutting taxes is a popular brand but they keep their seats by “bringing home the bacon” for their constituents. A farming community does not want to see decreases in crop subsidies or favorable tax breaks. Voters magnify the burden of spending cuts, feeling as though they are shouldering more of the burden than other voter groups.

In his second term, Donald Trump has adopted a different approach – kill the beast. Readers of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies will remember the scene where a mob mentality overtakes a group of shipwrecked boys and they start a feverish chant after a hunt, “Kill the pig, spill its blood.” The cuts that Musk and his DOGE team are making on the federal work force resemble less the precision of a surgeon and more the frantic swinging of a knife in the dark. They have targeted recent hires with few job protections and paid little attention to what those workers do. In their zeal to kill or wound the bloated government – the beast – they have laid off nuclear safety and food safety workers,  infectious disease specialists and IRS workers near the height of tax filing season. Both Musk and Trump are among the wealthy elite. Neither is dependent on a tax refund.

In his recently published book Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, Marc J. Dunkelman recounts the expansion of the federal government, starting with the Progressive movement that began under Theodore Roosevelt’s administration over a hundred years ago. The movement embodies two instincts that are in constant tension, a “progressive schism” whose roots began when the nation was founded (pg. 22). Alexander Hamilton favored a strong central government whose institutions could facilitate the commerce and defense of the new American republic. Thomas Jefferson believed that the integrity and character of the new nation depended on the yeoman farmer, who must be protected from the power of government. Jefferson was horrified by the abuses of a strong British government headed by a monarch.

Progressives want to expand the reach of government – the Hamiltonian instinct – but are fearful of the power of government – the Jeffersonian instinct. The struggle between these two sentiments frustrates the aims of the Progressive movement. Progressives’ “cultural aversion to power renders government incompetent, and incompetent government undermines progressivism’s political appeal” (pg. 15).

For more than a century conservatives in both political parties have tried to check the ambitions of the progressives and the expansion of the federal government. For almost a century following the civil war, southern Democrats fought to preserve their political dominance and cultural institutions from the imposition of reformist norms by “northern elites.” There is still a strong antipathy to federal power but most of us have adapted to and enjoy federal institutions created by progressive legislation. Millions of Americans enjoy our national parks and monuments but over a century ago, local groups protested federal interference in the management of lands within state boundaries like Yellowstone Park, Glacier National Park and Grand Canyon National Park.

We no longer argue over child labor laws introduced by progressives in the early 20th century. Though popular today, conservative groups fought against the Social Security program when it was first introduced in the 1930s. Congressional Republicans, however, were largely unopposed, according to this 1966 interview with George Bigge. Opposition to “socialized medicine” stymied proponents of a Medicare type system first proposed in 1942. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower initially supported a health plan financed through the Social Security system but dropped his endorsement over objections that the program was a slippery slope to socialized medicine (Source). Wilbur Mills, the powerful Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, overcame Republican opposition to the Medicare program by introducing a Part B system for physician payments that would be voluntary. Many of us make an uneasy truce with federal power when those policies produce a net gain for our well-being, or there are limits to federal mandates.

This week, Donald Trump completed the first month of his second presidential term with a whirlwind of federal job cuts and controversial remarks. The first ninety days of a presidential term are said to be the honeymoon period when public opinion is still forming but recent polls by Quinnipiac University and CNN indicate that initial favorable sentiment has soured. More respondents disapprove of Trump’s policies than approve. Trump has promised to downsize both spending and taxes but preserve the Social Security and Medicare programs. Both programs are popular, as many voters feel that people have earned the benefits after a lifetime of paying taxes. The taxes, or dues, come first; the benefits come later.

There are no dues for the Medicaid program which provides health care insurance for low-income households. The federal government and states share the costs of this program in varying degrees, with the federal government picking up the majority of the costs. The Republican majority in the House has proposed $880 billion in cuts to the Medicaid program and Trump has expressed support for the cuts, surprising some Republican lawmakers and Trump’s own staff.

Trump acts with the impulsiveness of a 14-year-old boy. In an earlier age, the public wanted a stable hand in control of a vast nuclear arsenal. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, voters seemed less concerned with Trump’s erratic behavior. Some excuse it as a negotiating ploy; others see it as a tactical maneuver. In Washington, where everyone has a “loaded weapon,” so to speak, Trump presents a moving target. Others see the policy moves as sheer incompetence. Over a thousand employees at the National Park Service were laid off and seasonal hiring was frozen (Source). Oops. Seasonal employees fight forest fires and clean bathrooms at National Parks. The Trump administration did an about face and promised to hire even more seasonal employees than the Biden administration did (Source). The daily two-step is a boon for news organizations and pundits. Lots of copy. Not a dull moment in the 24-hour news cycle.

Advocates may clamor for the death of the beast – the government – but many of the functions that the beast provides are popular. In 1963, the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary released the song Puff, the Magic Dragon. Although Puff was an eternal creature, his friend Jackie Paper eventually lost interest in Puff as he grew up. After his friend abandoned him, Puff lost all his vigor and retreated into his cave by the sea. Some wish that the federal government would do the same. Lobbyist Grover Norquist wished that government would become so small that “we can drown it in a bathtub” (Source). Unlike Jackie Paper, the majority of the public has not outgrown its affection for government programs or its belief in the magic of government power.

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Image by ChatGPT at the suggestion “draw a picture of a multi-colored dragon on the shore of the ocean with a cliff behind him.”

Great Upheaval

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In his book The Great Upheaval, Jay Winik recounts the details of the constitutional convention in 1787. The delegates debated the creation and role of a federal government, concerned that such a strong central power would overwhelm the states. To this day, we continue that debate.

Unable to resolve their differences in open debate, the delegates met behind closed doors and away from any press scrutiny to hammer out the details of what would become the Constitution of the U.S.