PITTSBURGH (TNS) — The question is: Why should public monies given to private enterprises for public purposes include goodies for public officials? Isn’t this what we would normally call a bribe?

Like some guy caught speeding who hands the officer a $50 bill along with his license and registration. Or the guy who offers a building inspector a nice deal on a new car if he overlooks a couple violations of the construction code. You can go to prison doing that.

Yes, but in politics, including state politics, there seems to be another way of looking at it.

THE GOODIES

As the Post-Gazette’s Ford Turner reported, “In a June 17 letter obtained by the Post-Gazette, state Sen. Jarrett Coleman of Lehigh County asked the administration for details on spending under a $1 million amendment made to a state grant support contract just before the high-profile golf tournament at Oakmont Country Club. Among items covered in the amendment, the letter said, was a ‘sponsorship’ with an ‘outdoor seating area, hospitality tickets, parking passes and a pre-championship golf outing.'”

The senator, a Republican, wanted to know “why the contract was amended less than two weeks before the tournament, as well as how many passes, tickets and golf outing slots DCED received.” He asked the state’s Department of Community and Economic Development who got the goodies — some apparently went to “external parties” — the funding for which came out of the department’s sports marketing and tourism account.

The government decides that the public good is served by helping some private enterprises do what they do and indeed do it more successfully. The usual reason is a claimed economic benefit, usually new jobs or increased business.

The state’s investment helps some people make more money, but that’s not unfair special treatment because it advances the common good. The state gets money back in increased tax income and may benefit financially in other ways, like people putting in jobs and taking them off unemployment or state aid.

How well it does this and how impartial it actually is in giving out public funding for private enterprises is a question. The answers, I think, are not all that well and not so much. “Power tends to corrupt,” as the English historian Lord Acton famously said, and the power to give other people money is great enough to be easily corrupting.

Even so, there’s a broad consensus that the government should do this. To clear, I support this kind of spending, but if a government — meaning individual people with power, in this case to spend our money — wants to give out money, we must understand how easily the system for spending it can be warped and corrupted.

The consensus comes with thousands of people sticking out their hands asking for money and competing with each other for the available funds. Their business may depend on it. Some of them will be happy to, not “bribe” but “influence,” state officials by making the deal more personal. And state officials apparently say okay.

IF NOT A BRIBE

Let’s say the “outdoor seating area, hospitality tickets, parking passes and a pre-championship golf outing” aren’t a bribe as we peons would see it. That there’s some way of defending the practice as a contribution to the public good. That state officials can show that getting such goodies doesn’t affect their judgment and advances the public good.

I don’t think there is a way to do that, but I’ll grant there might possibly be one.

Even if there is, it doesn’t matter. Public officials should conduct their public work as Caesar’s wife, or at least as Caesar’s ideal for his wife.

The story, as told by the Roman historian Plutarch, is that Julius Caesar’s second wife, Pompeia, hosted a religious ceremony at which only women were allowed. A young man named Clodius dressed as a woman and snuck in, was caught, and then put on trial for sacrilege. While at the ceremony, he reportedly had some sort of romantic or sexual connection with Pompeia.

Caesar divorced her right away, even though he said he didn’t believe the stories. The prosecutor at Clodius’s trial asked him why he divorced her if he didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. He answered, “Because I thought my wife ought not even to be under suspicion.” The saying as we have it today goes “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion” or “beyond reproach.”

Everyone in any position of trust should try to be Caesar’s wife and set up rules to make sure he works that way. That’s what codes of ethics are.

AVOIDING ENTANGLEMENTS

Journalists cannot take gifts and favors from people we write about, and in my case edit and publish. That’s basic journalistic ethics.

We can’t for two reasons. One, the danger that even small gifts and favors will subtly affect our judgment, making us less critical or more supportive of our benefactors than we should be. I’d like to believe that I’m incorruptible, but human beings cannot safely believe that.

And two, we need not only to be as independent and objective as humanly possible, but to be seen to be that way. We must absolutely avoid compromising positions, relations with our subjects and sources that other people will reasonably think to be entanglements that change our decisions.

And so should state officials. Many Americans are reasonably suspicious enough of government, seeing it as the tool for “elites” to get their way and advance their own interests. State officials need to prove they’re truly public servants. They can start by not making deals that come with goodies.

(David Mills is deputy editorial page editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)