The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-29)

SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B7

C

ongress has an ethics problem. It has

long failed to eliminate the risk that

lawmakers will misuse confidential in-

formation they receive in official briefings. A

decade ago, Congress addressed the issue by

passing the Stop Trading on Congressional

Knowledge Act, which shortened the deadline

for members to disclose trades and reiterated

that insider-trading restrictions applied to

them. But lawmakers are still free to trade

stocks and other investments, an issue that

can affect matters such as national security

and public health.

Congress i s now debating n ew e thics restric-

tions for its members to prevent insider trad-

ing and reduce conflicts of interest. Lawmak-

ers have enlisted by the dozens in an ongoing

bipartisan reform effort following media scru-

tiny of suspiciously timed stock trades, un-

timely financial disclosures and the insider-

trading conviction of a former member.

At least 125 of them have co-sponsored 14

bills and resolutions. Some have sought to

mollify an outraged public with weak bills that

don’t cover spouses, lack effective enforce-

ment p rovisions or do little more than r aise t he

fine for tardy disclosures from $200 to $500.

But the strongest proposals would prohibit

stock trading except through blind trusts or

outlaw owning some investments altogether.

As could be expected, not everyone is

excited about the effort. House Speaker Nancy

Pelosi initially bemoaned what she described

as an attempt to exclude lawmakers from the

“free-market economy,” though she later said

she’d be open to enacting new rules “if

members want to do that.”

Prospects for a congressional stock-trading

ban looked good earlier this year, but Congress

has slow-walked deliberations. Rep. Zoe Lof-

gren (D-Calif.) suggested that complex policy

questions might take time to resolve, saying,

BY WALTER M. SHAUB JR.

Congressional stock trading

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DOLA SUN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

spring cleaning

CONTINUED ON B8

Twitter: @waltshaub

Walter M. Shaub Jr. is a former director of the

U.S. Office of Government Ethics. He currently

serves as senior ethics fellow with the Project on

Government Oversight.

“It’s way more complicated than I understood

when I first started looking at it.”

But the issue isn’t complex. The only thing

complicating reform in the legislative branch

is that some members lack objectivity when it

comes to applying certain standards to them-

selves. Congress should put the public’s inter-

est first and pass a stock-trading ban.

M

odern American culture has a way of

transforming nearly every philosophi-

cal and spiritual tradition (see: Zen

Buddhism, yoga) into an anodyne pop-culture

analogue. But contemporary iterations of

Stoicism — a Hellenistic school of thought

that deeply influenced ancient Rome — may

win the prize for reducing complex ideas to

shallow, if marketable, sound bites.

Founded in 3rd-century-BC Athens by Zeno

of Citium, and later practiced by such lumi-

naries of the Greco-Roman world as Seneca

and the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius,

Stoicism focuses on the cultivation of personal

goodness through command of the self —

stressing, in particular, the ways we can

control our emotional responses to the world

around us. At its best, Stoicism challenges us

to tame our selfish passions and trains us to

accept injustice, failure and death.

Contemporary pop-Stoicism, however,

treats this idea of self-control as — in the

words of Ryan Holiday, author of the Stoic-in-

fluenced “The Obstacle Is the Way: The Time-

less Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph” — a

useful “life hack”: individualistic, capitalist-

friendly self-help. Today, conventions like the

BY TARA ISABELLA BURTON

Stoicism

Twitter: @NotoriousTIB

Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novels

“The World Cannot Give” and “Social Creature,”

and the nonfiction “Strange Rites: New Religions

for a Godless World.” Her next book, “Self-Made:

Curating Our Image From da Vinci to the

Kardashians,” will be published in 2023.

annual Stoicon draw thousands of attendees,

while popular podcasts like “Stoic Solutions,”

“The Sunday Stoic” and “The Practical Stoic”

reimagine Stoic wisdom for a modern age.

Some of pop-philosophy’s biggest names, in-

cluding Jordan Peterson, also draw heavily on

elements of Stoic thought. For these writers,

Stoicism can often be boiled down to thera-

peutic platitudes: work hard, push through

pain, reframe toxic narratives.

But pop-Stoicism doesn’t a sk one of philos-

ophy’s most important questions: What does

it mean to live a good life? Stoicism is

ultimately a philosophy not of personal

success but of virtue, encouraging us to

become good people, not just effective ones.

And goodness, unlike productivity, is some-

thing we can’t “ hack” our way toward achiev-

ing.

Twitter: @JosephEStiglitz

Joseph E. Stiglitz, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel

Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, teaches at

Columbia University.

T

he coronavirus has provided critical

evidence that our current patent sys-

tem, specifically for lifesaving prod-

ucts such as vaccines and medicines, should

be tossed out. Its design is simply inad-

equate for the 21st century, and it has

impeded our response to the pandemic.

While the patent system has enabled drug

companies to make billions of dollars, it has

hindered production of vaccines, contribut-

ing greatly to their lack of availability in

developing countries and emerging mar-

kets, and furnishing ample opportunity for

the virus to mutate to the more contagious,

more dangerous, more vaccine-resistant

variants we’ve seen.

And we the public are paying fourfold: We

paid for the basic research that allowed for

the development of the mRNA vaccine; we

provided massive assistance to help drug

companies bring the vaccines to market; we

pay high prices for the vaccines and other

medicines publicly and privately; and now

that the disease has festered, we pay continu-

ing health and economic costs.

The patent system

BY JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

Patents are a social construction — laws we

make for society’s betterment, not simply an

individual’s profit. But they are also a prize,

designed to reward and encourage innovative

activity. They are a very badly designed prize,

however — the award of a monopoly right that

works by restricting production and raising

prices. It’s the antithesis of what we should

want, which is the widest dissemination of the

benefits of innovation.

There are alternatives beyond the public

funding of research on and testing of drugs,

such as a publicly funded monetary prize for

scientists who succeed in making lifesaving

drugs and vaccines. For years, Sen. Bernie

Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced legislation toward

that end, and there have been discussions at

the World Health Organization on how such a

scheme could be implemented globally. It’s

past time.