Just thinking about a hypothetical scenario that could come to fruition

[320 Years of History]

The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”
-- Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
​

In a different thread, another member wrote sardonically, "A politician's kin benefits from political connections. Hmmmm. Imagine that."

That correlation is hard enough to discover and prove when the parties involved are required to make comprehensive financial disclosures...At least the money can be followed. Now consider a situation where none of the parties involved is required/permitted to disclose anything.

• Person A privately owns a wide array of companies that deals (profits) directly and globally in buying, selling, and/or renting at least one of the factors of production. (It's important for you to click on the link and watch the video. It's a short video.)
  
  Note: there is a huge difference between "buying, selling and using" in the marketplace one or several factors of production, and "using" one or several factors of production to produce something that is offered in the marketplace. Participants in the former activity control a (or several) factor of production itself; participants in the latter activity control the creation of one or several outputs of production.
• Person A shares ownership with their spouse and children.
• Because Person A's company is privately rather than publicly held (not subject to public corporation reporting requirements and not subject to public charity reporting requirements), their business discloses nothing that it doesn't want to disclose.
• Assume Person A's businesses produce annual revenues in the billions.
• Assume Person A becomes President of the United States.

It is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles.
― Niccolò Machiavelli​

Given the hypothetical scenario/situational factors noted above:

• What do you think is the risk that Person A can abuse their political position?
• What sort of character must Person A have for you to at least think s/he would not abuse their political position?
• What means have you/we to determine whether or when Person A is/has abused their political position.
• Under which of the following two fact patterns would you be more or less likely to trust that Person A will not abuse their political position?
  • You have no detailed and independently verifiable visibility to Person A's prior business financial practices, and there exist numerous past and some ongoing instances of Person A having been embroiled in legal action alleging Person A's malfeasance.
  • You have detailed and independently verifiable visibility to Person A's prior business financial practices, no matter whether there exist prior or current allegations of malfeasance.

Give me honorable enemies rather than ambitious ones, and I'll sleep more easily by night.
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones​

 

[alpine]

Transparency and accountability are the two main and very precious elements of the western democracy, as far as I can see...

 

[waltky]

Remember Billy Carter and his Billy Beer?...

... and his liason with Moammar Khaddafi?

 

[SuperDemocrat]

I understand. You don't like Trump. I like how you insinuate that a person like Trump could be a bad president. You didn't say his name exactly but list things that people would associate with Trump. Here is my hypothetical scenario

A person spends most of his life bashing the capitalist system and most of his friends are communist. He might even be one himself but we will never know because the media has gone full blown communist for this guy. He gets elected into office and every communist government in the world rejoices. They even hang around him and invite him to parties. No one ever dares to raise some questions about this because he told everyone that only racist thinks bad things about him. Eight years later everyone believes his lies that the economy is going strong despite the fact that their are millions unemployed.

 

[320 Years of History]

I understand. You don't like Trump. I like how you insinuate that a person like Trump could be a bad president. You didn't say his name exactly but list things that people would associate with Trump. Here is my hypothetical scenario

A person spends most of his life bashing the capitalist system and most of his friends are communist. He might even be one himself but we will never know because the media has gone full blown communist for this guy. He gets elected into office and every communist government in the world rejoices. They even hang around him and invite him to parties. No one ever dares to raise some questions about this because he told everyone that only racist thinks bad things about him. Eight years later everyone believes his lies that the economy is going strong despite the fact that their are millions unemployed.

Red:
Based on your statement and what I know I was driving at, I know you either didn't grasp all the "insinuations" in the OP, or you chose not to accurately summarize them. You did identify the allusory element correctly. Doing that though is inconsequentially tangential to the analysis one must perform to answer the questions the OP poses. The primary implications and concerns, however, are where you missed the boat.

Why/how? Because in U.S. history, AFAIK, there's never been a President whose primary business/income producing interests apply directly to a factor of production.

• Jimmy Carter owned a privately held peanut farming business. Are peanuts a factor of production? No, they are an output that come from using factors of production. Mr. Carter put his business in a blind trust to avoid the appearance of impropriety.
  
  That said, President Carter surely didn't forget where his business sat in the marketplace even though he had no direct control over its operations. But let's be real, while Presidential decisions may impact the peanut industry, few likely do, and even if many did, can you really envision a President, any President making choices based on their impact to the peanut industry, thus to their own peanut farm? Were Mr. Carter an oilman of a certain class and size, I'd have a different view because of the role of oil in world markets.
• Hank Paulson was in a similar but materially different position in that he was a major shareholder in a public company that has significant influence over two factors of production: capital.and and its use in entrepreneurship. He sold his interest prior to becoming Treasury Secretary.
  
  Merely putting his stocks into a blind trust would not have been sufficient to avoid the appearance of impropriety because as with Mr. Carter, there's no way he'd have forgotten the nature and extent of his interests in investment banking. I mean really, the man was Goldman's CEO and major shareholder/owner of options, not merely one of many shareholders in Goldman. Just as I know what are the major positions held in my investment portfolio and what overall investment strategy my financial advisors follow/apply in managing my investments, so does he; so does everyone who owns stocks, bonds, options, and other financial instruments.

So what makes Person A in the OP scenario different?

1. Person A's business interests are privately and closely held business that trades in a factor of production: land --
   • Are peanuts a factor of production? No. They are a product of production.
   • Is Goldman privately held? No.
   • Is Goldman subject to public disclosure? Yes.
   • Are those things so of privately held companies? No.
2. Person A's relationship with the people who run the company after Person A becomes President is more than merely a business relationship. It's an immediate family relationship and a business relationship.
   • Do you actually think Person A will have zero visibility to the operations of his company(s)?
   • Do you actually think that if Person A shares policy information/insights before its released to his wife or children and there's any way for the American people to know whether he did or didn't? Get real, one could, with great difficulty no doubt, make connections between a person who uses their influence for personal gain via publicly held companies and individuals with whom one should have at best a business-personal friendship. The country, government watchdogs, cannot just monitor the the private conversations between a man and his immediate family members.
3. Were Person A to engage in using their office unjustly by sharing information with immediate family members, the only people who really benefit are Person A and his family. Person A's competitors might also benefit, but only by watching what Person A's family members do and following suit. Even if they benefit, however, they are unavoidably behind Person A, never ahead or on even par, simply because they have to observe and glean "what's what" before acting. In a business cycle, where and by whom are the greatest profits made? At the start of the cycle by early participants.

What got me thinking about the ethical matters discussed above and in the OP are the allegations and recriminations in the news about Mrs. Clinton's peddling influence and access in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation (CF). It's not that I think "money for access" is "squeaky clean," but I see it as very different from the risk of abuse posed in the OP scenario. How?

• First and foremost, peddling or not peddling influence/access, Mrs. Clinton gets no personal financial benefit from the donations to the CF. It's a charity not a business. Rich people create charities, but they get rich from something other than the charity. There's just no way around that. Charities give away money and resources; they do not channel them to the people who create them.
• The "transactions" (donations, information flow, etc.) pertaining to the alleged CF and Mrs. Clinton's "pay for play" are relatively easily traced and the impact, if any, not hard to identify.
  • I discussed how "money for access" works here, but I'll repost the process for convenience.
    • • Donor gives "big money" to CF
      • CF spends money on needy people and various good/service providers
        • Was HRC one of those recipients of money? No.
        • The donor clearly wasn't.
      • Donor requests meeting with Hillary Clinton (HRC)
        • Meeting does not occur --> End.
        • Meeting occurs --> Go to #4.
      • Donor and HRC meet.
      • Donor ask for "something" from HRC/SecState, which by inference means U.S.
        • Donor receives what was requested --> Go to #6
        • Donor does not receive what was requested.--> Go to #6
      • Increase in HRC personal fortune?
        • Yes --> deposit is recorded and investigated
        • No --> nothing happens
      • End
• 501(c) entities are required to file public and detailed tax returns. It's not hard to see who give money and who received money. The tax returns are published, as is the CF donor list, which didn't have to be published, but was because disclosing it was part of the agreement between the Clintons and the government.

Blue:
None of those things are ethical conflicts of interest. Believe it or not, the 1st Amendment allows us freedom of expression and freedom of association. One may or may not agree with anyone's alleged communist leanings, but that one has them is one's right.


Green:
"The economy is strong" is a conclusion that informed individuals make in the wake of critically analyzing the major elements of the economy in question. Employment is but one of those factors; moreover, millions of folks can be and generally are unemployed in both strong and weak economies.

I'm not going to write more about the "green" remark because it's clear from how you responded to the OP -- you completely missed the "factor of production" implications on ethics even though I included a link that explains what the factors of production are and left it to readers, you included, to "put two and two together."** Additionally, the way you presented an economic matter -- the strength of an economy -- as though that can be gauged one dimensionally. You made not so much as even a passing reference to the most important aspects of the OP and dwelt exclusively on the least important one.

What all that tells me is your grasp of economic concepts is weak. Now that's no great sin, but it is the reason I'm not going to engage with you, beyond what I wrote in this section's first paragraph, in a discussion about economics. I'm sure you can read what various folks have to say about the economic state of a economy, but that doesn't place you in a position of being able to on your own evaluate discuss the economics of a matter; it merely allows you to know what someone else thinks. I'd be willing to engage those other persons on economic matters, but not you.

• Khan Academy
  
• Concise Encyclopedia of Economics| Library of Economics and Liberty
  
• Guides | Library of Economics and Liberty

**Note:
I did that for a reason: so I could tell who responded after having thought about the matter and who understands the correlations. Call that what you will, but having been a university instructor for a time, and having raised three kids and having mentored/tutored over five times that many, and managing the work and careers of literally hundreds of of people, I know how to present ideas so that I can tell what respondents do and don't understand/know, and to what extent, about a topic.

 

[Ozone]

I did that for a reason: so I could tell who responded after having thought about the matter and who understands the correlations. Call that what you will, but having been a university instructor for a time, and having raised three kids and having mentored/tutored over five times that many, and managing the work and careers of literally hundreds of of people, I know how to present ideas so that I can tell what respondents do and don't understand/know, and to what extent, about a topic.

well, there you go, there's the problem right there. if person a is you, it's really just a question of how certain you are about what you think you know about what other people know.

 

[320 Years of History]

I did that for a reason: so I could tell who responded after having thought about the matter and who understands the correlations. Call that what you will, but having been a university instructor for a time, and having raised three kids and having mentored/tutored over five times that many, and managing the work and careers of literally hundreds of of people, I know how to present ideas so that I can tell what respondents do and don't understand/know, and to what extent, about a topic.

well, there you go, there's the problem right there. if person a is you, it's really just a question of how certain you are about what you think you know about what other people know.

??? Really? You chose to respond to the "footnote" to my post rather than the central substance of it.


Actually, no, it isn't about that at all.

Pick a thing at which you have been trained and are thus well informed and adept, even if one isn't among "the foremost experts on the planet" for the topic The topic be anything -- objects, people, places or endeavors:

• Chess playing
• Car racing
• Star gazing/astronomy
• Auto repair
• Landscaping
• Watchmaking
• Cooking
• Dinosaur bones
• Prosecution of military combat (war)
• Legal argumentation
• Your kids
• Software development
• Dancing
• Economics
• Flying airplanes
• Business and personnel management
• Marathon running
• Target shooting
• Forensics

For that topic/thing/activity, when you find yourself in a discussion about it, you can tell which individuals in the discussion know what they are talking about and which ones don't. Moreover, you also can present or solicit thoughts about the topic so that by the nature of the in the replies you receive you will know whose remarks on the matter are well informed/well considered and whose are not.

Now most folks, myself included, won't do that in most situations, and almost never in in-person conversations because in interpersonal conversations, there's rarely a need to do so; people generally keep mum about things they don't know well when others who do know that topic well are present. At the most, if they have an idea they want to present and that is "radical," they will at least present it as a question followed with a coherent explanation of why they asked it.

In discussions that may take on a competitive nature, discussions such as these on the WWW, or such as the structured ones of forensic debate, people will sometimes set up the discussion (their remarks) in the contrived way I describe above. The reasons why are simple:

• In Internet discussions, people discard all the conventions of discursive decency. People will literally pontifically say anything that crosses their mind and that they think for some reason is worth sharing. You know this as well as I do...so does anyone with the sense God gave a goose. One need only look around the USMB forum for evidence of it.
  • How often do you see folks whom you do not know personally and who have have made conclusive remarks with little or no substantiation?
  • How often do you see folks remark on a very complex topic as though one single factor -- sometimes a material factor, other times an ancillary one -- is the "be all, end all" to where things stand/go with regard to that topic? (That's what the other member did re: the matter of the economy and unemployment.)

Given folks willingness inanely remark in that way, one needs to have a way, with regard to topics where one is very well informed, to have a way to illustrate to those folks who are not, the inadequacy, incoherence, sophistry, speciousness, or "whatever" of their remarks and do so without resorting to banal "one liner" insults. Why that? Because children use the "you're an idiot" retort and they do so because they don't have a stronger retort or well developed argument for their stances or against others'. They just believe what they believe because they believe it (or because their parents told them to), not because they've closely examined the matter.​

• In forensic debate, the moderators structure the event and the discussion topics so that it's easy to discern (judge) the competitors. As the debates/orations/interpretations are judged, it's critical to be able to tell which participants (1) know the subject matter (2) know the strategy and tactics of rhetoric and reason, and (3) which of them has a better mastery of them in any given forensics context (competitive forensics event).

So as go my own areas of expertise -- business management, business process management, the elements of social sciences that influence business management, and economics -- and the areas for which I'm no expert but that I'm well informed/trained enough to know what passes "the sniff test" and what doesn't, it's not about what I "think," it's about my knowing when what I see/hear flies in the face of what has been legitimately, established through decades or centuries of rigorous research, experimentation, analysis, and so on.

I will refute them. Someone may have an idea or an approach pertaining to an area of my expertise that goes against all that is understood to be so. I'm willing to entertain unconventional ideas, but once I go looking for/at evidence that supports them and find none, I'm going to refute them. It's not that I'm closed minded about innovative ideas -- innovative and unconventional approaches to business processes/management are what I've made a very successful 30 year career of selling and implementing -- I'm open to hearing those ideas, but unless the person can present their thoughts in a way that credibly and cogently shows their superiority over existing thought and approaches, I'm going to conclude the person is either wrong, incapable of effectively expressing their thoughts, has taken one or several concepts out of context, has overvalued the importance of a factor(s) or just doesn't know what they are talking about. Which of those conclusions I arrive at depends on the nature of the person's remarks.