The people at the top pay little or no price for failure or worse.

At USA Today, Glenn Reynolds writes,

Politicians and bureaucrats are America’s ruling class and they should start paying a price for failure. Accountability isn’t just for little guys.

…But now I’m wondering if we don’t have a problem. First, Charles C.W. Cooke, a Brit who just recently became an American citizen, noted the practice of calling former government officials by their former titles and called it “grotesque.” It’s something he discussed in a recent book.

“By custom, we allow our politicians to retain their titles for life. Throughout the 2012 election, Mitt Romney was referred to as ‘Governor Romney,’ though he had not been in public office for six years,” Cooke wrote. “One can only ask, ‘Why?’ America being a nation of laws and not men, political power is not held in perpetuity, and there is supposed to be no permanent political class.

…In America, if you misunderstand the law, or simply are ignorant of it, you will nonetheless be liable to go to jail or be sued — if you are an ordinary citizen. If you are a government official, you can generally avoid liability in a lawsuit by pleading “qualified immunity,” meaning, in essence, that you misunderstood the law or were ignorant of it, but acted in good faith, a defense that is not available to ordinary citizens. As a judge or prosecutor it’s even better: you enjoy “absolute immunity,” meaning that in almost every circumstance you can’t be sued at all.

These governmental immunities aren’t in the Constitution, and they’re not the product of statutes passed by Congress. They were invented by judges (themselves government employees) who thought immunity for government employees was a good idea. And government officials almost never face criminal prosecution for their official acts, and on the rare occasions that they do, they are almost never convicted.

When the EPA poisoned the Animas River in Colorado, it rejected claims for damages, and nobody from the EPA went to jail. A private company under similar circumstances would have faced ruinous losses, and the executives would have risked criminal prosecution. Then-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy skated.

…Freedom from consequences: It’s the defining consequence of our modern titles of nobility. And as ordinary citizens get cut less and less slack, it becomes more and more noticeable that the people at the top pay little or no price for failure or worse. Either that will change, or we will see more populist anger in our politics.