Why We’re Not Nuts About ACORN
By Benjamin Pacini • Monday, October 5, 2009 3:02 pm
After some amount of hubbub over a previous post, I’ve decided to address AS.org’s reasoning for being so displeased with ACORN.
There are many reasons to dislike what ACORN did. You can read my whole list from my earlier post, but it includes the following:
- ACORN is a highly partisan organization, with deep connections to the SEIU (labor union) and other leftist organizations.
- ACORN has now been deeply embarrassed by two amateur journalists.
- They were embarrassed because they were assisting two people—posing as a pimp and a prostitute—who wanted help getting a loan on a house to keep 13 El Salvadorian sex slaves.
- They did these things using taxpayer dollars.
But these reasons—while important—are only auxiliary, and, to be frank, rather sensational in nature. The primary reason why we disapprove of ACORN, and feel that they should be defunded, and investigated, is this: they have never been able to demonstrate adequacy of controls over their use of funds.
In other words, it is very possible that the pimp and hooker fiasco was an outlier (we all hope that is was.) But even if it were not—and there is no evidence that it is not—it still demonstrates that the leadership of ACORN is not training, supervising, or monitoring their staff in the way that they ought to in order to be entrusted with taxpayer dollars.
To make this clear, let me share two simple thoughts. First, what would have happened had these events taken place in the offices of a JPMorganChase office, instead of in an ACORN office? There would certainly be prosecution, and stock prices would have plummeted.
This leads to my second point: stock prices would have dropped because such a display would certainly indicate that the company had bigger problems. Private investors look very carefully before investing their money in a firm. They look to be sure that the firm has control over their employees, and that there is sufficient training and supervision. If investors aren’t convinced, then the firm gets no money.
In this case, ACORN is the firm, and the investors are the US Congress. Not only should we be unsurprised by the desire to stop investing in ACORN, but—as with investigations currently underway at Bank of America—shareholders (taxpayers) have the right to know if there was fraud involved in any way.
But the battle isn’t with ACORN. If ACORN gets destroyed, then we have put a band-aid on a broken arm without really fixing the problem: the government simply is not as good as the private consumer at determining the worth of an investment. No private lobbying firm—identical to ACORN in any other way—would have survived for long with problems like ACORN’s.
We will have lost the real battle if ACORN is defunded and investigated, but the government is not held more accountable for the way that it spends taxpayer dollars.
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Quite insightful. Good post.
>> Matt October 6, 2009 10:39 am
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