Capitol Ideas
Bethell, Tom
"Capitol Ideas" do, I—unlike Szasz—would not object to confinement to restrain the psychotic from acts that would be criminal if done by a sane person. But our ability to predict is much less than psychiatrists...
...Already mentioned in this column, it concerns-the federal employee who ,diversed nearly$900,000 of government money into his own bank account...
...Capital, my dear Causey...
...The best guess is that it is a combination of things including good pay, regular automatic raises, fringe benefits and of course, the big item never mentioned in fringe benefits, job security in a very tough market...
...There are 1.4 million federal white-collar workers, and it is a good bet that most of them vote Democratic...
...No, a serious demeanor is required in Washington...
...So, in the fullness of time, these things came to pass...
...Rather, it is busy and ostentatious...
...One day he simply made out a voucher for subway funds to himself...
...He said a lawyer told him that recipients of presents could not be forced to return them after his arrest...
...Sibert had a criminal record, having already been convicted of housebreaking (in which no property was taken) shortly after he finished high school...
...GS-5s are thus transformed from being overpaid to being underpaid...
...One reason for all this gravity is to give the appearance of having "policy significance...
...is now $20,800...
...Within two months he had issued vouchers to himself totalling nearly $900,000...
...therefore, let us not go on strike...
...The average federal white-collar salary in D.C...
...the same tone pervades much of the local news media...
...Treasury...
...Murderers (or criminals in general) are "sick...
...Let me quote from Mike Causey's "Federal Diary," a column for and about federal employees published in the Washington Post...
...One of the most striking ways of acquiring status in Washington is to make a show of working early and late...
...In the case of psychotics we may not call what follows a guilty finding "punishment...
...Nobody knows how many job hunters have been frustrated by long lines or seemingly forever busy telephone numbers, and have given up...
...Later, during the flight, he told his seven guests in the first-class section to order a final round of drinks...
...The breakfast meeting is the high-status meal in the capital...
...Tom Bethell Capitol Ideas The holiday season found Washington largely emptied of its busybodies...
...Recidivists also may be dealt with without distinguishing between sane and insane...
...Beyond the threat of a seeping scandal, there are other reasons why the president, whoever he is, can more or less be relied upon to sign this pay raise into law...
...Hartman comments: "This finding—which a hard-nosed type might regard as an Tom Bethell is Washington editor of Harper's and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...
...The work ethic more than prevails, it threatens to overpower...
...I don't think it's a living thing...
...The government is not something that has a feeling...
...The American Spectator February 1978 21...
...His supervisor signed it...
...This comes up every October...
...They have not been able to quite dispense with these notions—it is impossible to have a society without them—but, because of their uneasiness, they have disguised moral judgments which now take the form of pseudo-clinical diagnoses...
...History does not relate what became of the supervisor...
...On the other hand, if a person has committed a criminal act, I do not really care whether he is found "not guilty by reason of insanity" and confined in a mental hospital, or guilty and confined to a prison...
...Presidents Nixon and Ford were sometirfies a little tardy, stubborn, or unenthusiastic about signing, but when that happens such documents as the presidential income tax form 1040 are in grave danger of popping up on the front page of an important newspaper...
...So this year President Carter lost no time in signing on the dotted line just as soon as the dotted line was put under his nose, and now all federal workers are being paid 7.05 percent more than last year...
...Sticks-dwellers, we give thee thanks...
...But our ability to predict is much less than psychiatrists have pretended...
...Some wise old heads at the Civil Service Commission, or some such place, put their wise old heads together and said to one another: If we were to strike, no one would be any the wiser, or any the poorer, while for others life might actually be greatly simplified...
...As you can imagine, it is hard to find a funny story in this atmosphere, but one happily comes to hand...
...It is hard to avoid concluding that many of today's editorial doomsayers would in former years have preached from pulpits...
...Sometimes it seems that the people in town came here out of a sense of moral earnestness, high seriousness, and civic obligation...
...Also, there is the danger that they may vote Republican next time...
...The theory behind "comparability," of course, is that if people are not offered enough money to work for the government, they 20 The American Spectator February 1978 will turn to the private sector instead...
...How does this work...
...He also bought a new $60,000 house with a swimming pool and renovated it for $30,000, outfitting it with $10,000 worth of such items as closed circuit TV systems and pink-and-white shag carpeting...
...If you are trying to get a federal job right now," Causey writes, "the odds are 76 to one against you, and getting longer every day....During the first six months of this year, 5,664,757 people—that is more than the total population of either Missouri or North Carolina—tried to get a government job...
...Sibert was eventually arrested at the end of a flight from Washington to Las Vegas...
...excuse for a pay reduction—was transformed into a pay raise under what is called the government's comparability method...
...The gloomy reformers of government, joined in common cause against nationwide frivolity and profligacy, are here to see to it that the rest of us confess our sins in triplicate...
...Sibert remarked that the government was "inept" to have put so much trust in him—a convict—in its handling of billions of dollars, and "stupid" in the way it has attempted to recover property he bought with the funds...
...Solemnity therefore prevails...
...You may not have known it, but federal pay is based on something called "comparability...
...Are there, then, rows of empty desks in Washington, and recruiting officers almost at the edge of despair as they wait for an applicant to walk through the door...
...No one back home noticed the difference...
...In March 1977, a GS-5 clerical worker was paid $10,677 annually...
...Hartman explains: "At GS-5, the private sector secretarial wage was combined with technical jobs paying $11,770, administrative posts at $12,346 and professional slots at $13,439, to reach an average survey salary for GS-5 of $10,736...
...He found that banks would cash U.S...
...If you work in the State Department or the Pentagon or, heaven help us, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or in just about any agency, you cannot afford to be lighthearted or the tiniest bit frivolous if you want to get ahead...
...Why, they do what I don't approve of...
...Modern liberals feel uneasy with the notion of moral right and wrong, of moral norms (rules, laws...
...Sibert, who incidentally was one of those $10,000-a-year GS-5s, was working as a financial assistant in the Urban Mass Transit Administration...
...In addition, he said he bought a 30 foot houseboat, made gifts of $3,000 or so to women who worked in his office—trinkets such as diamond rings, IBM and ITT stock purchased through his account at Merrill Lynch—and paid $80,000 for a topless bar a block from FBI headquarters...
...I did not say that the work done was useful work, mind you...
...Two points, both related to the foregoing, come to mind...
...Actually this marvelous story has a rather sad ending because William Sibert, the perpetrator of the crime, was sentenced to six years in jail for his larceny—quite a stiff sentence considering that armed robbers routinely get probation if they are first-offenders and therefore presumed not to know that it is wrong to threaten an innocent bystander with a loaded pistol...
...It is instructive to note that Sibert was caught not because the money was missed by UMTA, but because his bank eventually became suspicious about his very high "cash flow" and alerted the U.S...
...Without it, everyone will know that you lack "policy significance," and that means you are not really earning the high salary generously furnished by taxpayers...
...Robinson wrote in the Post—and it is hard to improve on this—that as Sibert checked his baggage he "thought he saw several neatly dressed men watching him closely...
...Which is a little mystifying, because if those figures are correct, then there are not 76 but about 180 applicants for each job...
...Armed with this data, they then return to Washington, and here they reliably find, year after year, that those laboring in the private sector are being paid more than those who work for the government...
...Quite often I am asked: What is it like to live in Washington...
...But he said that most of them had been "scared" into returning such gifts nevertheless...
...Causey adds this detail: "Federal officials point out that the statistics—the 5.6 million inquiries—represent only people who got through...
...and unlike Szasz, I believe we must institutionalize those insane persons who are totally incompetent or dangerous to others...
...They aren't counted in the statistics...
...Only 31,000 of them made it...
...Szasz is right and meritorious in protesting the over-extension of the notion of disease—but he goes too far when he denies, by definition, the possibility of mental disease and the need, occasionally, for society to take decisions for those who are in no position themselves to take them...
...You are setting a bad example and will be frowned upon...
...It comes with the money...
...Try to imagine a SALT negotiator with a sense of humor...
...Some new details about the Sibert case came out in an article by Timothy S. Robinson in the "Metro" section of the Washington Post...
...But the important thing is that the same processes be used to ascertain the facts and to protect thecommunity whether or not the offender is "sane...
...There is the danger that if federal workers are not paid more every year to keep up with inflation, they may sullenly decline, in the many ways open to them, to implement presidential programs...
...Thus, there rarely is sufficient reason for preventive action...
...Then I thought, 'Heck, if you're going to get caught doing it, do it right,' " Sibert told Robinson...
...Sibert has brought a few uneasy, fleeting smiles to a few faces in Washington, which is more than most government workers achieve...
...I have always thought that that is why federal employees are not allowed to strike...
...This need persists...
...the bureaucracies ticked along quietly with the high absentee rate customary at that time of year...
...The caper was up...
...Let us see how this works in greater detail (I am indebted here to Robert W. Hartman, an economist with the Brookings Institution, for these figures...
...The first is that, contrary to what many may believe, Washington is a busy hive...
...Tonight I shall drink to his health...
...As an admirer of Causey's column, I was a little disappointed by the following disingenuous footnote: "Nobody knows for sure why there is this big, and growing, upsurge of interest in federal employment...
...At that time the BLS investigators returned from the heartland and reported their findings: The salary for comparable jobs in the private sector was $10,100...
...Hence we may just as well use the same processes and outcomes regardless of whether the person was disturbed—and not responsible therefore—or sane and responsible...
...Sibert then deposited the check (for $55,916.47) in his own bank account and started to spend the money...
...I don't feel like I've done a crime against the government," Sibert said...
...The evidence...
...Government specialists from the Bureau of Labor Statistics set forth across the land each year to find out how much money people are earning in the private sector...
...Szasz has the merit to have drawn attention to abuses and confusions...
...Thus, I agree with Szasz on the treatment of the insane who have committed crimes, but unlike Szasz I believe there is such a thing as mental illness, which Szasz believes is a labelling device...
...To some of our madcap judges such thugs demonstrate not their own criminality but the viciousness of the society in which they were raised...
...Slam...
...Treasury checks in the tens of thousands of dollars with no questions asked...
...And so it goes through all the grades, involving mysterious techniques such as the "dual payline process," until it is finally concluded that an "across-the-board" pay increase is warranted, and it only remains for the president to sign it into law...
...There you have a capitol idea in action...
...Poor old William Sibert did something far more reprehensible: He demonstrated the stupidity of government...
...The second feature of Washington that one cannot help noticing is that it is a peculiarly somber, serious town...
...Six years for him...
...The mental hospital is not better for him, or the community, nor more curative...
...Szasz is often right in practice though for reasons other than those he gives: not because there is no mental disease as he thinks but because its presence does not usually permit us to predict behavior that, if it could be predicted, should lead to confinement...
...Still, mere incompetence, if it goes far enough, may require institutionalization: We would not leave a four-year-old to his own devices and we cannot do so for a person no more competent, whatever his age...
...Here is Robinson's description of what Sibert did with the money: ...he spent nearly $200,000 on at least 12 cars for friends and members of his family and took coworkers to lunches on the southwest waterfront where he would pick up $500 tabs...
...Anyway, as a result of the pay raise, the Washington area is now richer to the tune of $700 million a year...
...The reason is, I think, federal workers are paid highly enough to ensure that a good many of them wake up in the morning feeling guilty, which drives them to do something (when nothing might often be better...
...Federal pay is then increased to make up the difference...
...But he has not persuaded me that mental disease is a hallucination —although I too wish the world were neater...
...There's only one way—all out...
...At O'Hare airport, as he was getting his flight to Las Vegas, Nev., he realized there were too many men wearing TWA jackets for a routine flight...
...One day Sibert cashed a $36,000 check and the bank was actually forced to close its doors for several hours while it waited for another money delivery...
...So are suicides...
...By way of compensation, however, the wise old heads said to one another: We shall pay ourselves at an ample rate of remuneration, and—because we do not wish to be sullied with the contamination of "politics"—we shall make it very difficult for any of our number to be fired...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
