… and absolute power corrupts absolutely” – so Lord Acton famously wrote to Bishop Creighton on April 5th, 1887.
History, of course, has no shortage of examples – from the minor to the monstrous – of this truth. White House advisor Kevin Hassett has just supplied history with yet another example when he not only criticized the new empirical study by the New York Fed that shows that the bulk of Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports are indeed paid by Americans, but when he – Hassett – also insisted that “consumers were made better off by the tariffs.”
The corruption unleashed by possessing power, or by being in friendly close contact with it, can be of the mind. Or this corruption can be of the soul. Or it can be of both mind and soul. I’d prefer to believe that Mr. Hassett’s rendezvous with power has corrupted his mind and not his soul – that his nearness to power has merely disengaged his ability to think straight, to reason soundly, and to examine facts and arguments dispassionately.
Minds can be fixed. Souls, once corrupted, not so much.
