“I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into … the seat of criminal activity in this country.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked that question during oral arguments in Trump v. United States on April 25, 2024.
Disincentive.
What restrains powerful people when they can keep the rewards and forward the wreckage to somebody else?
“Both sides are corrupt” is the familiar escape hatch. Used to end inquiry, it is lazy: corruption across parties establishes neither equal corruption nor equal damage. Human fallibility is a reason to build constraints, not abandon distinctions.
Government is something we share responsibility for building, maintaining and repairing. New failure modes require investigation, redesign and testing. The task is not to find an incorruptible tribe. It is to make corruption harder, including for the tribe we prefer.
The first two parts of my series moved from recognizing wolves “by their fruits” (Matt 7:15–20) to protecting those capable of detecting them. But detection is not deterrence. Documenting predation offers limited protection if biting sheep remains profitable.
Nor does every danger begin with a predator. Sometimes we invent something useful and discover that usefulness was only one of its properties.
Financial engineering enabled elaborate arrangements for packaging and trading risk. Before the 2007–09 crisis, institutions inadequately understood or controlled the resulting exposures. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s majority called the disaster avoidable: warnings were ignored and safeguards failed. Financial institutions received extraordinary public support while millions lost jobs, savings and homes.
By the time the bill arrived, the bonus had cleared. Billionaires used “innovation” to exploit regulatory loopholes, and transferred wealth from taxpayers into their pockets (…sounds…familiar?).
The internet expanded access to knowledge, commerce and one another while forcing reconsideration of privacy, security, competition and cross-border responsibility. Connectivity changes not merely how much we exchange, but the relationships through which benefits and harms travel.
Social media added a business model. The FTC’s 2024 investigation found advertising incentives driving extensive personal-data collection, often against users’ privacy interests. A useful service could reward its provider for practices its users reasonably wanted constrained.
The promoter need not share the user’s definition of success.
Smartphones made connectivity intimate and persistent: personal devices, usually with us and almost always on, as the FTC noted in 2013. A network on a desk and a network in a child’s pocket are different social arrangements. Privacy, attention and classroom rules deserve reconsideration accordingly.
AI extends the problem from circulating information toward generating it and participating in decisions. Reliability, privacy, discrimination and excessive reliance require scrutiny in particular uses. Adequate for brainstorming does not mean acceptable as an unreviewable authority over someone’s livelihood. Meanwhile, electricity and cooling demands keep the infrastructure’s costs physical.
I use AI tools a lot. Their usefulness makes honest accounting more urgent, not less.
These are overlapping developments, not five identical disasters. Each changes what we can do, at what scale, and to whom.
Regulation is not merely punishment. At its best, it is collective learning translated into enforceable obligations.
An unknown risk, a known risk inadequately controlled, and a deliberately concealed risk require different responses. Discovery calls for investigation; neglect for correction; deception for accountability.
Novelty is not guilt. Neither is it immunity. Perhaps the sheep need to learn the difference?
The title’s accusation belongs where someone turns the gap between capability and oversight into a business strategy. The invention may be genuine. But when success depends on retaining benefits while assigning consequences to people who never consented, getting away with it becomes part of the product.
Paul warned about serving “their own belly” through “good words and fair speeches” (Rom 16:18). Look past the promise. Follow the benefits and burdens.
Regulation itself needs correction. Rules can protect incumbents or outlive their justification. Regulatory lag and capture are different failures: one leaves oversight behind; the other bends it toward those it should constrain.
Build institutions that learn through independent testing, incident reporting and participation by affected communities. Sometimes the repair is a new rule; sometimes enforcement or removal of an existing one. Discovering a failure should create an obligation to repair, not an entitlement to keep the exemption.
“A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself” (Prov 27:12). The institutional extension is ours: where people cannot individually escape danger, foresight must become collective protection.
Which returns us to the Oval Office.
Executive power is institutional technology: a human-designed arrangement for concentrating authority. Government must govern new capabilities while scrutinizing its own. This is engineering without the fantasy that people are interchangeable components. Those affected need a voice in what is built and the power to challenge it.
Hamilton contrasted presidential accountability with royal inviolability in Federalist No. 69. The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling recognized absolute criminal immunity within exclusive presidential constitutional authority, at least presumptive immunity for other official acts, and none for unofficial acts.
Not blanket immunity. Still: what is the disincentive?
Safeguards must resist both official misconduct and retaliatory prosecution: due process, independent enforcement, separation of public power from private financial interests, and meaningful review of emergency powers. Constitutional reform may be necessary where constitutional doctrine creates the problem.
Jeremiah’s predators appear “among my people.” They “catch men,” grow rich, and flourish where “my people love to have it so” (Jer 5:26–31). The problem includes the community’s accommodation.
Paul mocks people tolerating exploitation while congratulating themselves, “seeing ye yourselves are wise” (2 Cor 11:19–20). But noticing gullibility cannot become another excuse to leave the exploiter alone. Of course, the worst offenders are the bootlickers who assist the wolf by poisoning the sheepdog’s food. They conspire against the very system intended to protect the flock, either as useful idiots or as corrupt accomplices.
Shared responsibility does not mean equal blame. Greater power carries greater obligations. Cynicism excuses neither neglect nor surrender.
The purpose of a guardrail is not to improve the driver’s soul.
Perhaps Trump’s most useful legacy could be a presidency rebuilt to frustrate the next Trump—or the next charismatic Democrat whose appetites align with ours.
The test is whether we build restraints strong enough to inconvenience even the people we want to win. Structural reforms and strong fences are required, but it is only a matter of time before the wolf innovates a way around our defenses. The bulwark is our culture: our norms and our moral values, which are constantly exposed as weak and hollow, as we do not love our neighbor as our ourselves.
Put the disincentive where decisions are made.
Put the consequences where profits go.
And when the wolf bites the flock, stop sending the other sheep the bill.
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The First Story, Commandment, & Sin — January 15, 2026
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Ugolino’s Hunger for the Future’s Flesh — December 4, 2025
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Fear the robots — June 22, 2014
An early warning that automation’s benefits may concentrate with capital while workers and democratic institutions absorb the disruption. -
Thoughts on the web's effects on our minds — July 28, 2008
An early attempt to hold the internet’s intellectual promise and its cognitive costs together, rather than choosing technological nostalgia or uncritical enthusiasm.
