The Honolulu Ethics Commission recently interviewed candidates for a job without putting the interviews on camera, and for this it is being scolded. The complaint is that the public could not watch.
The critics prize transparency, and they are not wrong to prize it. Decisions made on the public’s behalf should be made where the public can see them. But transparency is one good among several.
Goods have a way of crowding one another out. A reasonable person can desire two goods at once and feel the tension. The difficulty begins when someone decides his favorite good is the only one worth having.
Obsession, on its own, is harmless. The man who loves stamps cannot seize the Postal Service and reprint his favorites. The man who loves old coins cannot take over the Mint and bring back the penny.
A billionaire is another matter. He can endow a stable of nonprofits and ride his hobbyhorse into policy. George Soros has done so on the Mainland, and Pierre Omidyar has done so here.
The rich have always had a heavier hand in politics than the rest of us, for good reason. They have interests worth defending and the means to defend them. They usually believe they grasp the public good better than the public does. Outsized success is good for the pocketbook and bad for the ego.
Our system assumes interests will compete. Government sits in the middle as a sort of referee. Governing well means admitting you cannot give every side all it wants. The trouble comes when the contest is lopsided. One cause is pressed by well-funded and tireless advocates, with no one of equal weight pushing back.
Transparency is exactly that kind of cause. It sounds good, it is good, and you will search a long while before finding an anti-transparency nonprofit. So a question rarely gets asked aloud. What happens when transparency is carried all the way to its limit, with nothing left to weigh against it? Not results, not speed, not whether anyone competent still wants the job.
In Hawaiʻi we are finding out. Honolulu Civil Beat and the Public First Law Center have long worked to make public boards hire in the open. Both nonprofits are housed within Pierre and Pam Omidyar’s charity network. The law center brings the lawsuits. The newsroom supplies the coverage. When one donor funds both the campaign and the reporting on it, the public debate has a single chair at the table.
They have gone after the Honolulu Police Commission and the University of Hawai‘i Board of Regents before. Their latest target is Honolulu’s Ethics Commission, faulted for interviewing candidates outside a live, broadcast meeting.
Carry transparency to the limit and it runs into another good. Nobody campaigns for that good, because it has no slogan. It is the willingness of decent people to serve at all.
Picture the interview from the candidate’s side. The salary is a third less than the private sector would pay her. Her tenure is uncertain. A new mayor or somebody else’s scandal could end it within the year. Before she begins work, she must publish her debts, her holdings, and her investments for anyone to read. The press will sift each decision she makes for a usable headline. She and her family can expect threats now and then.
And then the last condition: the job interview will be filmed and archived, whether or not she is hired. During testimony time, any stranger may take three minutes to say whatever he likes about her while she sits silent. And any serious hire involves frank questions from board members. These will be answered on a permanent, public record.
Civil Beat has opined that financial disclosure does not deter public service. And recording interviews may not deter qualified candidates from applying either. Perhaps. But Hawaiʻi is not suffering a surplus of able, honest people elbowing one another aside to lead it. The shortage runs the other way.
Corruption is real, and the Omidyar network is right to hate it. But the corruption is not in the process. It is in us. Daylight exposes the rot, but it cannot reach far enough in to heal it.
The men who built the American system knew this. John Adams said it was “made only for a moral and religious people” and is “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” They leaned on Christian religion not as decoration but because it claimed to do what no statute can: reach into a man’s heart and change what he loves.
Corruption is not Hawaiʻi’s only problem, and transparency is not Hawaiʻi’s only need. The family that can’t make rent is not waiting on a cleaner hiring process. It is waiting on a government able to do something about the cost of living. Big problems yield only to capable people who can act—and act quickly.
Full transparency, carried to the limit, works against both effective action and speed. It turns many of the most capable away at the door. The ones who stay must decide at the pace of public meetings. All the while, the trouble they were hired to fix keeps piling up.
The ones demanding total exposure rarely bear this burden. The law center’s director is paid around $225,000. Civil Beat’s editor makes about $200,000. Mr. Omidyar is a billionaire many times over. They will be fine whatever becomes of the state.
Nobody recorded their hiring process, but I would guess they feel they are doing good work on behalf of the public, transparency or no. The public has few ways to give them feedback. It can only grant or withhold donations and page views.
A government with nothing to hide and nowhere to hide it would be a glass house—splendid from the street, and very hard to live in at noon. The sun comes straight through the walls, and there is no corner cool enough to think in.
The remedy is not to brick the walls back up. We still want to see who is inside and what they are doing.
The remedy is windows and shades — daylight where it serves the public, shade where exposure would do nothing but drive good people off the lot. Public First says “open government is essential to a healthy democracy.” The larger truth is that good government is essential. And good government means holding many goods in proper balance.
Transparency belongs among other goods. It was never meant to stand alone.
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Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
