[Forgotten Amendments]

How can you live with yourself when you are knowingly stealing and harassing innocent people daily? It takes a specific twisted personality to do this job daily and be ok with it.

Funny, I just saw this addressed the other day:

http://www.theagitator.com/2012/03/05/durham-loses-another-prosecutor/

Public choice theory tells us that public officials don’t magically start behaving selflessly and altruistically simply because they’ve chosen a career in public service. They’ll still act in their own interest most of the time, as we all do. That’s not an indictment of public service. It’s a recognition of human nature, and how we’re hard-wired. In terms of policy, it’s prescribes that we design our institutions in a way that accounts for how people actually behave, not for an idealized version of how we hope they’ll behave. The left tends to dismiss public choice theory outright. The right tends to believe it’s applicable to all areas of public service except law enforcement and criminal justice.

[Forgotten Amendments]

These are generalizations, of course. There are exceptions on both sides. But good people don’t thrive in systems with bad incentives. You either attract bad actors, turn good actors into bad ones, or the good actors drop out, leaving you only with the bad ones.