We Are In a Moral Great Depression After America’s Ethico-Legal Crash.

Instead of a crashed market, we have a crashed ethico-legal system. Quite distinct from stock market collapse or a failure of the banking system — all of which the government has reinsured with federal funds and zero interest rates & FDIC-instead America’s ethico-legal system has collapsed. This does not mean the courts are closed or unwilling to function, but no society can long function based on formal legal rules; it must function as the late John Rawls said on an assumption of compliance with legal, ethical and institutional norms arrived at by public consensus. These norms and behavioral understandings have crashed in the Executive, the bureaucracy and the Congress — particularly the Senate. We can see this by the multifarious scandals, the willingness of the DOJ to intercede for unbridled political objectives and public consensus.

It is reflected in disdain for expertise that informs both moral and prudential judgments in government. This crash or Moral Collapse is far more insidious than the crisis of secession in 1860 or the Depression of 1929, because its very existence is the subject of abject denial and ignorance.

-Albert Turner Goins